New Kind Of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled By Anna Gibbons

Article Review #3 The article “Ardipithecus ramidus: A New Kind of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled” written by Anna Gibbons, talks about how scientist learn many things about human evolution through artifacts of ancestors, DNA and bones. All of this helps reveals different things about our past and how we came to be. This article briefly mentions Lucy and it mainly focuses on the discovery of ardipithecus ramidus. In the short introductory paragraph, Gibbons mentions Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton that proved that before our ancestors evolved big brains, they walked upright. Lucy tremendously paved the way for anthropology and it helped disclose a lot of information about human prehistory. Since Lucy's discovery, researchers

This rare skeleton is not the oldest putative hominin, but it is the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor. Ardipithecus Ramidus was found with most of its skull, teeth, pelvis, hands, and feet. This skeleton didn’t look like a chimpanzee, gorilla, or any of the closest living primate relatives. This revealed that Ardipithecus Ramidus was a new type of early hominin that was neither chimpanzee nor human. 47 researchers described how Ardipithecus Ramidus looked and moved like in 11 published papers. The skeleton, who was nicknamed "Ardi," lived in a woodland, weighed about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) and was about 120 centimeters (3-4 feet) tall (Gibbons 37). She was as big as a chimpanzee and had similar brain size. Unlike apes, Ardi did not knuckle-walk or swing through the tree, she walked upright, and perhaps her diet consisted of nuts, insects, and small mammals found in the woods. Most researchers agree that Ardi is an early hominin but not everyone agrees about that they walked upright and what Ardi revealed about our

It was a hominin molar. The team look through that area, and found the lower jaw of a child with an attached milk molar. The team knew that the molar they found was of a hominin both older and more primitive than Lucy. In November 1994, Yohannes Haile-Selassie found pieces of a bone from the palm of a hand. That discovery was followed by the finding of pieces of a pelvis, leg, ankle, and foot bones, many of the bones of the hand and arm, a lower jaw with teeth, and a cranium (Gibbons 37). By January 1995, it was clearly visible that they had found a partial skeleton. A downside to this discovery was the skeleton’s poor condition, some parts of the skeleton had been crushed and scattered into many fragments. When the bones where touched, they would crumble. The researchers decided to finish excavating the fossils in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and virtual reconstructions of the crushed skull and pelvis were made in Tokyo and Ohio. Some fossils that were taken to Tokyo, were scanned with a custom micro–computed tomography scanner that help show what was inside the bones and teeth (Gibbons 38). Once the digital reconstruction was done the skull was compared with those of ancient and living primates in museums