Word: ramidus
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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Until this year the famed Lucy and her fellow members of the species Australopithecus afarensis were the oldest known members of the human family. No more: at 4.4 million years of age, the newly unearthed Australopithecus ramidus is the closest link yet (no longer missing) to the common ancestor of apes and humans. A second major find: Homo erectus, the first of Lucy's descendants to leave Africa, made that move about 800,000 years earlier than had been thought. Anyone want an obsolete paleontology book, cheap...
That's exactly the case with the new species, which now bears the scientific name Australopithecus ramidus (ramid means root in the local Afar language). Like Lucy and her clan, known as Australopithecus afarensis, ramidus had teeth with some apelike and some human characteristics. But at least one specimen -- a baby molar still attached to a piece of an immature ramidus jaw -- resembles a chimpanzee tooth more than a molar from any known hominid. "It's obvious that it belongs to an ancestor of afarensis," says Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the Nature...
...those they found were in fragments; chew marks on the bones show that the hominids' carcasses were ravaged by carnivores. That makes it hard for anyone to be sure what these creatures looked like and how they walked. The fossils suggest that at least some members of the ramidus clan were about 4 ft. tall, but that doesn't establish what the range in height was. In some African apes, males are considerably bigger than females, as they were in Lucy's species as well. Says White: "We do know the arm bones come from an individual that was larger...
...these issues -- bipedalism, the forest-dwelling theory, the question of how high ramidus sits in the evolutionary tree -- can be settled only with more fieldwork. The team is returning to Ethiopia next month, to the site, hoping to find parts of other skeletons and uncover more clues about the Ethiopian environment of 4.4 million years ago. Says White: "We're going to crawl on our hands and knees, looking for every giraffe, pig, bird, rodent, seed and any other fossil we can find." Humanity has just added half a million years to its heritage; perhaps the next expedition will give...