We didn’t come from monkeys?!!!
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009“Fossils upend notion of how humans began.” This was the headline of an article in The Oregonian a couple weeks ago. To me, this is the most fascinating thing about fossils: they help reveal the story of evolution. Fortunately, it is a wonderful, never-ending tale, for we are constantly evolving to higher levels of consciousness and living longer. The psycho-sociological analyses of where we are and where we’re headed are most intriguing to me. It’s also always amazing how paleontologists are frequently finding new fossils that either augments what we already know or change the record of history completely. This helps keep life interesting as things aren’t always what they seem.
Fifteen years ago, a treasure trove of fossils dating back 4.4 million years, was found in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia. After years of working to piece together and study these fossils, a golden nugget has finally just been revealed. A new piece to the puzzle of evolution has been found. The team was lead by paleoanthropologist, Tim White of the University of California at Berkley.
The most important find of the cache was a skeleton of a human ancestor demonstrating that the earliest people looked nothing like a chimpanzee or other large primates, as is commonly believed. This find far surpasses the importance of Lucy. Lucy was a 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor of the Australopithecus species, found in the 1970s. When paleontologists found her, they already knew the major features of this species from other fossils found in the 1940s. These new fossils are of a completely unknown creature and more primitive than Australopithecus. The female specimen was named “Ardi,” short for the species name Ardipithecus ramidus. The main differences in Ardi is that she walked upright, and had dexterous hands, more maneuverable than a chimp’s, that made her better at catching things on the ground and carrying things while walking on two legs. To read more about Ardi, click here.
If we didn’t come from monkeys, where did we come from? What are your thoughts?
