![]() ![]() ramidus as being ancestral to Australopithecus," thus proposing she might indeed be an early hominin (the ever-changing nomenclatural group that usually includes living humans and our close extinct relatives, also referred to by White et al. So, does Ardi represent a true step toward humanity, or should she remain up in the side branches of the evolutionary tree? White and his fellow authors do not propose to have a definitive answer, but through painstaking analysis of the fossil data and surroundings, they conclude in the overview paper that, "There are no apparent features sufficiently unique to warrant the exclusion of Ar. In fact, Jungers says, "I think some of the things they said might have been for effect." The authors of the papers, including Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, propose that Ardipithecus was "an effective upright walker" and that it "resolves many uncertainties about early human evolution, including the nature of the last common ancestor." But many others in the field propose that some of these statements may be overblown. The 11-paper Science analysis has, indeed, sharpened more differences than it has smoothed over. "This is a fascinating fossil no matter what side you come down on," says William Jungers, a professor and chairman of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the Stony Brook University Medical Center in Long, Island, N.Y. The momentous find-announced 15 years ago and formally described in Science this October-has deepened academic debates about when bipedalism evolved, what our last common ancestor with chimpanzees looked like, and how some ancient primates gave way to modern humans. For such a petite creature, the 1.2-meter-tall " Ardi" ( Ardipithecus ramidus) has made big waves in the paleoanthropology world. ![]()
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