Word: ardys
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...environment, goes the reasoning, upright-standing primates would have had the advantage over knuckle walkers because they could see over tall grasses to find food and avoid predators. The fact that Lucy's species sometimes lived in a more wooded environment began to undermine that theory. The fact that Ardi walked upright in a similar environment many hundreds of thousands of years earlier makes it clear that there must have been another reason...
...what does that mean? Based on Ardi's anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may actually have evolved more than humans - in the scientific sense of having changed more over the past 7 million years or so. That's not to say Ardi was more human-like than chimplike. White describes her as an "interesting mosaic" with certain uniquely human characteristics: bipedalism, for one. Ardi stood 47 in. (120 cm) tall and weighed about 110 lb. (50 kg), making her roughly twice as heavy as Lucy. The structure of Ardi's upper pelvis, leg bones and feet indicates she walked upright...
Scientists know this because they've studied not only Ardi's fossils but also 110 other remnants they uncovered, which belonged to at least 35 Ar. ramidus individuals. Combine those bones with the thousands of plant and animal fossils from the site and they get a remarkably clear picture of the habitat Ardi roamed some 200,000 generations ago. It was a grassy woodland with patches of denser forest and freshwater springs. Colobus monkeys chattered in the trees, while baboons, elephants, spiral-horned antelopes and hyenas roamed the terrain. Shrews, hares, porcupines and small carnivores scuttled in the underbrush. There...
...knows what that reason was, but a theory about Ardi's social behavior may hold a clue. Lovejoy thinks Ar. ramidus had a social system found in no other primates except humans. Among gorillas and chimps, males viciously fight other males for the attention of females. But among Ardipithecus, says Lovejoy, males may have abandoned such competition, opting instead to pair-bond with females and stay together in order to rear their offspring (though not necessarily monogamously or for life). The evidence of this harmonious existence comes from, of all things, Ardipithecus' teeth: its canine teeth are relatively stubby compared...
Deducing such details of social behavior is, admittedly, speculative - and several researchers are quick to note that some of the authors' other major conclusions need further discussion as well. One problem is that some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction. "Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an Irish stew," says Walker. Indeed, looking at the evidence, different paleoanthropologists may have different interpretations of how Ardi moved or what she reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and chimps...