Word: ardipithecus
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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When Haile-Selassie compared the newly discovered bones and teeth with those of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old hominid found in the Middle Awash in the early 1990s that was the previous record holder, he realized that the two creatures were very similar. But the older one's teeth, while different from an ape's, do have a number of characteristics that are decidedly more apelike than those of the younger hominid...
...basis of these minor but distinctive differences, Haile-Selassie decided to classify the new human ancestor as a subspecies, or variant, of ramidus and has given it the name Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba. (The name is derived from the local Afar language. Ardi means ground or floor; ramid means root; and kadabba means basal family ancestor. In accordance with the sometimes bizarre nomenclature of science, the younger creature now gets renamed Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus...
...that it's wrong. The earliest humans, it turns out, didn't live in grasslands. Dry climate or not, a companion paper published last week in Nature shows on the basis of the other fossilized flora and fauna, as well as the chemistry of the ancient soil, that Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba lived in a well-forested environment. That's also the case with other extremely ancient hominids found during the past several years, including Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus and a species called Orrorin tugenensis, announced last December by French and Kenyan researchers. And while the ability to walk on two legs...