Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"

[rd_kent]

Source: National Geographic

Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago (interactive time line: how the new discovery changes human evolutionary theory).

The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.

Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi's key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like

Read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091001-oldest-human-skeleton-ardi-missing-link-chimps-ardipithecus-ramidus.html

---

Suck it Creationists! You wanted proof, well here it is. Darwin was right, years of study, experimentation and more study only support his "theory"! So much for that "the Earth is 6000 years old because I say it is, but nothing proves it, so believe me anyway" B.S.

I cannot wait to see how the spin goes on this one.......

[stray cat]

1. the missing link is when life began from non-life

show me how DNA and RNA formed the first proteins and how they became organized into free living single cell cell molecules and then re-organized to form distinct tissues in multicellular organisms.

[Orrex]

2. I'd like to hear an unambiguous definition of "life"

That would be a good place to start the search for the "missing link" you describe.

[stray cat]

4. the first independent free living cell that can replicate and protect itself

DNA alone is not life nor is RNA

[Orrex]

6. What about a virus?

And what does "protect itself" mean, exactly?

[kestrel91316]

16. One could logically argue that viruses are not life per se, but a sort of

proto-life. Prions are even funkier.

[Xipe Totec]

42. So they're, like, missing links between life and non-life? n/t

[Orrex]

51. DOWN GOES FRAZIER!

[sfwriter]

9. Clay and solid substrates...

Are the current leading contenders there. I also saw a story saying the evolutionary history of Prions may shed some light on this question. I've even heard an astrobiologist theorize the building blocks of RNA were laid out on cometary ice crystals.

Not knowing and seeing all of this amazing research is exciting.

[thereismore]

14. You have to take those things on faith. nt

[comrade snarky]

24. You have a strange definition of faith.

Whether you believe in fossils or not, one could still poke out your eye.

[No Elephants]

47. Does that mean I can't have one for Christmas?

[ret5hd]

19. I think what you are looking for is the origin of life, not origen of species, god boy.

[No Elephants]

46. Isn't that what Stray Cat said?

[musicblind]

54. Calling the poster God-Boy? Talk about bigotry.

He said nothing against the main article. He just said the real wonder of life that we have yet to uncover is how it all started in the first place.

And he is right. For that matter, where did the first primeval atom at the start of the big bang come from? Where did the dense and hot state that started the big bang come from? What is outside of the universe? What is outside of what is outside of the universe? These are all valid questions and points to raise.

It is telling that you assume, because he asked such questions, that he is somehow an enemy worthy of name calling. Calling someone "God-Boy" to mock their religion is no better than calling someone any other derogatory term, be it a term of race, sexual orientation, or regional experience.

It is sad how "right wing" some members of DU can be.

[comrade snarky]

22. Life beginning has nothing to do with evolution

That's called abiogenesis and is being studied as well. Evolution deals only with imperfect self replication. Life.

The jump from single cell to multicellular is an evolutionary change but has little to do with the initial formation of life since it occurred about 3 billion years later.

The missing link is a common creationist trope referring specifically to human origins. Of course like all discoveries in the hominid line they'll point at this and say "See! Now there are 2 more missing links on each side!"

[musicblind]

55. I don't think Stray Cat is questioning the existance of Evolution.

Pretty hard to question the existence of something that is clearly fact. I think he's just asking a question about abiogenesis. That is one of the last great mysteries of life that, so far, science has not yet shown us. I do believe that, someday, if we don't destroy each other first, science might find an answer. I do not believe that science and God or opposed at all. I simply think that science shows us how God works and creates. In the same way that learning how lightening is created does not disprove the existence of lightening. At least not for me.

My big questions are "What is outside the universe, what created the first thing that created the first thing that created the first thing, and if the other forms of life in the universe ever make contact with us... what will their view, or lack there of, be on religion. How will they have developed as a social structure. Will they have moral codes similar to our way of thinking."

[comrade snarky]

56. Then he should say so

That post looks to me like standard creationist goalpost moving.

Find a new fossil and you get "Well! How did life begin then hmmm? What does evolution say about that? See how it fails."

The state of general knowledge about what evolutionary theory is and what it says is dismal. I've beaten my head against that wall for years and will continue to do so. This is an amazing find and the post above tried to minimize it by contrasting it with questions that have nothing to do with human evolution.

That betrayed a basic ignorance of human origins, evolution and the significance of this find.

[aquart]

3. Okay, getting closer to my 6 million year theory. Cool.

[Orrex]

5. Very cool news, but...

According to creationists, every missing link that find simply creates two new gaps that "can't be explained."

[TrogL]

20. Read a kewl rebuttal to that the other day

Examining the fossil record is vague like watching surveilance cam footage. You see the bad guy on camera 1, then a gap, then camera 2, then camera 3. You cannot prove he has been in the building because there's gaps between the cameras.

:sarcasm:

[comrade snarky]

26. It's like watching a movie

And claiming nothing on the screen is moving because it's just a bunch of still pictures.

Denying the reality of evolution takes a willful ignorance these days.

[Ignis]

36. Are you talking about Dawkins' piece in Newsweek?

Because you're right, it was a great analogy. :)

Let's use the analogy of a detective coming to the scene of a crime where there were no eyewitnesses. The baronet has been shot. Fingerprints, footprints, DNA from a sweat stain on the pistol, and a strong motive, all point toward the butler. It's pretty much an open-and-shut case, and the jury and everybody in the court is convinced that the butler did it. But a last-minute piece of evidence is discovered, in the nick of time before the jury retires to consider what had seemed to be their inevitable verdict of guilty: somebody remembers that the baronet had installed spy cameras against burglars. With bated breath, the court watches the films. One of them shows the butler in the act of opening the drawer in his pantry, taking out a pistol, loading it, and creeping stealthily out of the room with a malevolent gleam in his eye. You might think that this solidifies the case against the butler even further. Mark the sequel, however. The butler's defense lawyer astutely points out that there was no spy camera in the library where the murder took place, and no spy camera in the corridor leading from the butler's pantry. "There's a gap in the video record! We don't know what happened after the butler left the pantry. There is clearly insufficient evidence to convict my client."

In vain, the prosecution lawyer points out that there was a second camera in the billiard room, and this shows, through the open door, the butler, gun at the ready, creeping on tiptoe along the passage toward the library. Surely this plugs the gap in the video record? But no. Triumphantly the defense lawyer plays his ace. "We don't know what happened before or after the butler passed the open door of the billiard room. There are now two gaps in the video record. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my case rests. There is now even less evidence against my client than there was before."

-- http://www.newsweek.com/id/216140

[Orrex]

52. That's pretty good--consider it stolen!

[Chulanowa]

60. That's because they use shitty science

No two ways about it. There simply is no such thing as a "missing link." It's pseudoscientific mythology, conjured up by cranks who tooled around the midwest with doctored monkey corpses in refrigerator cars charging a nickel a peek.

"Missing links" depend on evolution moving in a straight line and always in one direction. It also relies on the definition of "species" not being completely arbitrary. Further, the concept of "filling hte gaps" would then rely on having every single individual organism from now to the dawn of life catalogued and studied.

And of course, in an attempt to appeal to the gawping morons who'd pay money to see a frosty primate, even science journals keep using the goddamned term.

[Arugula Latte]

7. Ardi in the sky with diamonds.

Very cool.

[fascisthunter]

8. Hey Freepers. Want to know what ya Relatives Looked Like:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/85209423.html

[rd_kent]

10. Hahaha!

[TrogL]

21. I wouldn't want to meet that in a dark alley

[Selena Harris]

41. Alan Grayson's GOP

So THAT'S what the knuckle draggers Grayson spoke of ,look like....

[Chulanowa]

61. Now what did that poor dead primate ever do to you to deserve that comparison?

For shame.

[Botany]

11. Bucky Balls Rock

[rd_kent]

12. fractals do too!

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. What's really cool is the 'Enlarge Photo' link

Imagine that - they have a photo of this species alive, with hair, eyes, and everything!

[zeemike]

15. I am always amused when people find a fossil of piece of bane.

And from that they construct the whole history of the world and universe.
It reminds me of some blind man feeling the trunk of an elephant and thinking he knows all about Africa.
The real truth is that we don't know shit. And the vast history of Man and this world is far more complex and far more fantastic than we know and can know or imagine.
But when you are fighting a war (and that is what this is, a war of ideas) You must put on a face of confidence that you know all about it and so both sides make stupid statements.
And that my friends is why we fight.

[TrogL]

25. So you collect straw men?

There's so many logical fallacies in those statements I don't know where to begin.

A blind man feeling the trunk of an elephant can reach some fairly detailed conclusions about the animal. If told the animal is from Africa, he can reach some conclusions about that as well.

In the hands of a competent scientist, a single fossil can provide a wealth of information.

[zeemike]

57. OK help me with this.

The man feels an elephants trunk and because he has felt a lot of elephants trunks he can tell you that the tail has hair the end of it....and also that the elephants live in social groups and eat grass and trees and have live birth every 12 months or so and that Africa is a jungel....rigit?
But the bone man can go even further....he can go back millions of years and tell you how man came to be just by looking at a bone fragment.
I recall that one bone man found some bones in a Ki va in the southwest and from that he determined that the people of the region were cannibals because he saw "butcher marks" on the bones. I can't think of a better example of painting with a broad brush than that...And you call that science? Well I call it what it appears to me to be....speculation.
If someone did that in any other field or science they would be laughed off the island.
And by the way if that same bone man went to Tibet and examined the bones there he would find they all had butcher marks leading to the conclusion that they too were canables....do you know why?

[comrade snarky]

27. They just find a little piece of bone and make up the rest eh?

It's not like anyone spends their lives studying bones of similar creatures in order to make reasonable suppositions about what a new fossil would look like or where it will fit into the evolutionary tree.

Yeah, it's all made up. :sarcasm:

The real truth is more likely that you don't know shit and so assume no one else does either.

[zeemike]

58. Have you ever read The Source?

That is exactly what the author did....made up a story from artifacts in a dig....but he published it as fiction because he had no idea what the person was like or how his family lived or even what the weather was like at the time.
And so when you find a part of a skull and you present me with a picture of an entire creature....that is fiction because even the smartest bone man has no idea what the rest of the creature looks like....it could have ben hairless or not had blue eyes, dark skin or light long nose or short flat one. he could have been fully clothed or nakid...he could have even used iron tools for all we know....but you want to tell us with certainly that you know just how it was and how it happened because the other side is absolutely certain that you are full of shit.
Well the hard truth is that NONE of us know...and not all of us pretend that we do.

[comrade snarky]

59. So...

A lifetime studying similar lifeforms = wild ass guess by person off the street. No one knows absolute truth BUT there are those of us who have (through hard work and study) learned enough to make something rather a bit better than that wild ass guess.

As for the environment at the time, you can tell a lot about that by what was growing in the same layers. If you find trees and tree pollens there were probably trees. If you find desert dwelling reptile bones and cacti spines there's a good chance it was a desert. If there are mollusks attached to the rocks it was probably under shallow water.

See, all things may possible. It's possible all the oxygen in the room will end up in one corner due to Brownian motion and a slow breeze outside. Unlikely but remotely possible. I don't give it much thought because I KNOW it ain't gonna happen. It's about as likely as this little guy using metal tools. The idea of a creature with a brain 100cc larger than a chimp smelting iron over 4 million years ago is so wildly, outrageously ridiculous that it tell me a lot about the way you think.

Just because you cant think of a way to figure out what an animal looked based on it's bones doesn't mean no one can. I couldn't re-create calculus from nothing on my own.

That doesn't mean no one could.


Oh and by the way, the picture has hair because if the drawing didn't some people would be going "Hey! Where's the hair!?? They were monkeys" and others would be upset at the nasty picture of the naked ugly lady.

[zeemike]

62. Well I am all for speculation.

And in fact I think things can be learned from it.
But this is not being presented as that at all. It is presented as fact because the speculators are learned in their field of study.
But what is the reason for this? There is no reason to present it as fact except to prove the other side (the creationist) are wrong in there speculation....it is a war of ideology not a scientific endeavor.

But let me speculate too. And I have artifacts to back up my speculation and there are meany learned people that will agree with it.
So here it is....There was a world wide flood that destroyed the world.
And the artifacts that support this are the following.
The bible.
And it is an artifact, that was confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The writings of Plato, which told the story of Atlantis and the flood that destroyed it.
And the fact that this story appears in every civilization around the world including Native Americans who had no contact with the other civilizations as far as we know.
And there are other things that I will not bring up now for the sake of brevity.

Now I suggest that those things are evidence of a world wide flood, and so you must attack the evidence and declare it false because you know that it could not happen right?
And you know this how?
Because it has never happened in our history?...and that suggests that you believe that noting can happen that we don't already know about.
And I would give this as an example of what I am saying.
They showed this geologist a picture of the Sphinx that was cropped to show only the side of it and asked him what kind of erosion this was and he said water and that he was sure it was water no question....then they showed him the whole picture and he said no it was wind because we know that it has always been a desert and could not be water erosion.
I think it is a mistake to assume things are exactly like we think they are.

[comrade snarky]

63. I see

You want to believe obvious silliness and choose not to filter reality from fantasy. If nothing can be known with anymore certainty that anything else I will assume I'm talking to a computer program that randomly assembles words into internet posts. The fact this looks like a conversation is just happenstance.

It could be, you need to prove it's not. If you can't then I have to assume it's possible. The worldview you propose is of absolute credulity. Anything someone can come up with is as possible as anything else and that's not the case.

You want to believe in a worldwide flood go ahead but don't expect other people to respect it or take you seriously when you say it happened. I don't accept the idea because there's not enough water on Earth to cover the land. Also none of the civilizations you mention had any way of knowing what was happening on the other continents so how could they call a flood "worldwide". Local massive flooding is not the same thing.

Anyway, you seem to be misunderstanding my meaning. I still don't declare it "false" by any definition. I call it unlikely, so unlikely that I'm going to need some kind of evidence before I accept it and as I point out above a few localized peoples saying there was a big flood doesn't cut it. Until some kind of evidence (such as where the extra water came from and where it went) is found I will continue in believing it to be incredibly unlikely. Maybe some form of geological evidence, the kind geologists expected to find in the mid 19th century and didn't.

Still haven't, Kent Hovind lies aside of course.


It's also funny that you are saying "it's presented as fact" when I'm in another Ardi thread arguing that just because scientists use words like "could mean", "may be" and "possibly" it doesn't mean they don't have reasons for making those educated guesses.

Ardi is giving me mental whiplash.

[zeemike]

64. It is not really necessary to degrade my intelligence.

by suggesting that I am silly or given to fantsy....I will tell you that I am not well educated....but I am smarter than you think...but I am self educated and have no credentials and so I guess that means I am not qualified to talk and express what to to me to be the obvious.
But I had to look up who Kent Hovind was....never heard of him....but then I seldom read things like that because it is just more of the same....ideological warfare. And unfortunately science gets caught up in that same thing....at least some of it does.

But yes I can give you a rational explanation of the water necessary for a world flood. And it is alluded to in the bible And it is found in Genesis 7-11

"the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened."

And it has been proposed that the fracturing of the Methane layer in the deep sea was the cause of it all....and here is a Wikipedia on that Mathane...

Methane clathrate, also called methane hydrate or methane ice, is a solid clathrate compound (more specifically, a clathrate hydrate) in which a large amount of methane is trapped within the crystal structure of water ice. Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth.<1>

Methane clathrates are common constituents of the shallow marine geosphere, and they occur both in deep sedimentary structures, and as outcrops on the ocean floor. Methane hydrates are believed to form by migration of gas from depth along geological faults, followed by precipitation, or crystallization, on contact of the rising gas stream with cold sea water. Methane clathrates are also present in deep Antarctic ice cores, and store a record of atmospheric methane concentrations, dating to 800,000 years ago.<2> The ice-core methane clathrate record is a primary source of data for global warming research, along with oxygen and carbon dioxide.

While it is stable at a temperature of up to around 0°C, at higher pressures methane clathrates remain stable up to 18 °C. The average methane clathrate hydrate composition is 1 mole of methane for every 5.75 moles of water, though this is dependent on how many methane molecules "fit" into the various cage structures of the water lattice. The observed density is around 0.9 g/cm³. One liter of methane clathrate solid would therefore contain, on average, 168 liters of methane gas (at STP).

Now it is important to note that this is Noah's story not the story of the entire earth. but taking that story in the context of Plato's account of Atlantis that was destroyed by a big flood and sank beneath the sea, you can piece together a scenario that would work to explain it....A large movement of magma in the Atlantic ridge that fractures this hugh methane ice layer and it would truly be the fountain of the great deep.

[FiveGoodMen]

65. When the "fountains of the great deep broken up" the earth's crust would have collapsed.

[zeemike]

66. Really? How do you figure that?

The crust of the earth is several miles thick.

[FiveGoodMen]

67. And cracked like an eggshell. The plates are floating on the stuff underneath.

Think how much water you'd have to pull from these supposed underground sources to cover the mountains...

What would hold the eggshell up with so much empty space below?

[zeemike]

68. Well it was probably the crack that started it all.

Molten magma flowing up and fracturing the Methane ice layer and forcing the water in the rock under the sea floor up up and away....It would shoot tremendous amounts of water into the air and it could well fall for 40 days....and once it had subsided the water would go back into the rock slowly and the sea levels would go down.
As I pointed out the crust is several miles thick and the Methane ice in the upper part and does not support the crust....it is trapped in it and it contains water as well as methane.
And when ir fractures it suddenly changes from a solid to a gas under extreme pressure.

[comrade snarky]

69. I never said you weren't intelligent

Honestly. Hell, I never graduated from college myself, studied archeology while I was there though so I'd call myself an interested amateur. I've also known some seriously dumb people with Phd after their names.

However, that does not mean I don't respect people who devote themselves to real scholarship.

Richard Hoagland for example is quite intelligent. Deeply lost in the abyss of conspiracy, fantasy and wishful thinking but no stupid person could come up with the cathedral of silliness he's put together. Finding that many random connection to an arbitrary number like 19.5 isn't easy.

I'm also not getting into a flood debate here.
If you want to I'd encourage you to write up your theory and post it. It sound as though you are saying a tsunami is what happened not a rise in the water level, interesting... Of course a Mid Atlantic tsunami strong enough to flood the Tigris would probably wipe the British Isles clean. North, Central and South American Eastern coastlines would be ravaged for hundreds of miles inland. Should all be visible in the strata. One big saltwater flood where all the forests and plants and animals die. Sea creatures found in areas above sea level at the time. Increased salt in the layers across a wide geographic area. You should find the same in Europe and Africa as well.

If you can find a way to explain the lack of geological evidence I'd read it.

I'll tell you now, I doubt it could be done. Doesn't mean it cant, just that I don't think it will and I'm going to need more that someones word and a "maybe if" to seriously entertain the idea.

[zeemike]

71. Well you are right, this is off topic.

But it would not create just a tsunami but an actual rise in sea level. There is a lot of water trapped in the rock on the sea floor bound up with methane.
And there is geological evidence but i won't go into it here.
But this is not my idea...I read it long ago but can't remember who or where I read about it....but i remember it was not some crackpot or a creationist that brought it up.
but I am glad to meet another amateur thinker.

[TrogL]

17. But Darwin specfically said a "chimpanzee-like missing link" so all of Darwin must be wrong

:sarcasm:

[Plucketeer]

18. "small-brained"

So Beck's a result of this recessive gene??? :rofl:

[dalaigh lllama]

23. I can just see where your title "Disproves 'Missing Link'" is headed

[Mosby]

30. funniest thing about that toon

is that the researcher is reporting results that aren't statistically significant (p = .56). Kinda ironic considering what he's trying to say with the toon.

[Orangepeel]

34. I think that's a correlation coefficient (rho), not a p value

It's kind of hard to see, but that makes a lot more sense

[Mosby]

37. maybe he used p for pearson r

i don't know but the spearman rho is written r subscript s.

[Orangepeel]

44. I always see it as the greek letter

maybe preference in how it is written is discipline specific

[ima_sinnic]

40. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is rho, which looks like p

that is a rho in the cartoon.

[comrade snarky]

28. I'm sure the creationists will use one of the three old standbys

1) It's a fake! That one feathered reptile (out of a bunch) and Piltdown Man were fakes so this must be a fake too!

2) It's a monkey. Shut up, shut up, shut up! It's a monkey cause I say so!

3) LaLalalALlallalaalalalalalalalaaa! I cant hear you!

[harun]

29. Umm, it is specifically saying some of Darwin's assumptions and conclusions

were wrong.

[comrade snarky]

31. Evolutionary theory is 150 years old

"On the Origin of Species" is not a book of holy writ.

Darwin getting some things wrong does not invalidate the modern theory of evolution.

[endarkenment]

38. Ummm. not really.

It says, or at least the portions posted say:

"The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree."

Those are 'popular notions', not 'Darwin's assumptions and conclusions'. There is nothing about this discovery that does anything other than enhance the validity of Darwin's Most Excellent Theory.

[Dr Fate]

50. Not really- the fossil may link us to a common ancestor.

If so, that means Darwin was well within the ball park...

[JonQ]

32. I doubt it will prove anything

there was already enough evidence to convince those willing to be convinced by facts and science.


The rest will close ranks and shout this down.

[AngryAmish]

33. missing link

[MARALE]

35. Thanks for posting this

I went to the website and read the article. It was pretty interesting!

[InfiniteThoughts]

39. i am a deeply religious person ...

i am deeply religious as well as one of my school/college topper in science. my religion is Hinduism that states that the earth/universe (there's some confusion there!) is 4.5 bn years old and has another 4.5 bn years to go. after i have started working, i am investing a lot of time reading about Hinduism's theory on cosmology & how the universe has been created.

for example, hinduism is one of may be very few religions that got some science facts right. Hinduism states that the universe started from "nothing" and the "nothing" is undefinable. One moment there was nothing and then there was light.

however, that doesn't mean anything to me in science class. Evolution is an undeniable fact and creationism is the biggest hoax of mankind. And believe me, i amn't unique but the rule with hindus who don't mix religion & science too much ...

hinduism has a symbolic link to evolution - the 9 avatars (incarnations) of Vishnu (one of the Trinity) is Fish, Turtle, Boar, Lion, Dwarf, axe man, principled & simple man, street-smart player. Does anyone else see what i see - Fish (Aquatic), Turtle (Amphibious), Boar, lion (mammals), dwarf, dweller in the wild and organized living. While this is a simplification, i only see the theological value in it rather than asking schools to re-do evolution to jump from fish to turtle and nothing in-between.

apologies for the ramble. i wish i meet a few creationism supporters on this site.

[L. Coyote]

43. 1994 News: Ardipithecus ramidis, a new species of early hominid from Ethiopia

OLD NEWS!

In September, 1994, in Nature, Tim D. White and two students named Australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid. In a corrigendum in 1995 they placed the species in a new genus, Ardipithecus. 'Ardi' means ground or floor in the Afar language. The species was based on seventeen hominoid fossils with dental, cranial and postcranial specimens, all from Aramis, Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Both the antiquity, around 4.4 mya, and the primitive morphology suggest an ancestral species for the Hominidae. Prior to this publication the earliest hominid species was Australopithecus afarensis, dated to between 3.0 and 3.6 (possibly 3.8) mya.

A. ramidis was named in recognition of the Afar people who contributed to fieldwork. 'Ramid' means 'root' in the Afar language. The type, ARA-VP-6/1, an associated set of teeth from one individual, was found by Gada Hamed in December of 1993. The specimens were collected in 1992 and 1993. The hominid specimens were surface finds with the immediately underlying tuff dated at 4.39 mya.

The authors distinguished the species as follows: ............... http://jqjacobs.net/anthro/paleo/ramidis.html

Sources:

White, Tim D., Gen Suwa and Berhabe Asfaw. 1994. Australopithicus ramidis, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia. Nature 371:306-312.

White, Tim D., Gen Suwa and Berhabe Asfaw. 1995. Corrigendum. Australopithicus ramidis, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia. Nature 375:88.

[depakid]

45. The ape that stood up....

[Dumak]

48. This science editor must be some kind of idiot

If it turns out this is a human ancestor, then it would certainly qualify as a "chimpanzee-like missing link", as would most other recent human ancestors. An the whole point of the "missing link" discussion is to say that we, like all other living organisms, have evolved over time.

[Dr Fate]

49. ALL fossils are links to something.

That is why I've never bought the creationists "where are the missing links???" BS.

ALL fossils are a link to something- and of course we are lucky to even have what few fossils that nature happened to preserve.

[No Elephants]

53. Ardi looks like one of the characters in Planet of the Apes.

Life imitates art, retroactively.

[Meldread]

70. THE DEVIL PLANTED THOSE BONES THIS IS ALL FAKE!

Return to the flock! Return, my sheep, return!

:sarcasm: