1. Our Oldest Ancestor, "Ardi"
By EBEN
HARRELL Tuesday, Dec. 08, 2009
Reuters / Corbis
With her long, elegant fingers, 4-ft. frame and a head no larger
than a bonobo's, it's hard not to feel a certain fondness for little
Ardi, the oldest skeleton of a prehuman hominid ever found.
Painstakingly pieced together from more than 100 crushed fossil
fragments unearthed in Ethiopia, this female specimen of Ardipithecus
ramidus (Ardi, for short) lived 4.4 million years ago and had
remained anonymous until 1992, when her fragments were first
discovered. After 17 years of research, a team of scientists led by
Tim D. White from the University......
