Is the “Ardi” skeleton a human ancestor?
If she didn’t have offspring, as an individual, she could not have been a human ancestor, because her specific DNA would not have been passed on. We cannot tell whether she had children or not. Is the species Ardipithecus ramidus our direct ancestor? We cannot tell that yet, because we do not have enough fossils from different places and time periods. We will need many more fossil recoveries from the period of 3-5 million years ago to confidently answer that question in the future. But if Ardipithecus ramidus was not actually the species directly ancestral to us, she must have been closely related to it, and would have been similar in appearance and adaptation. Is the genus Ardipithecus our ancestor? There is no evidence available to refute the hypothesis that a species of Ardipithecus was the ancestor of Australopithecus, (or, indeed, that some species of Australopithecus was the ancestor of Homo). These genera can be thought of as three, mostly successive “adaptive zones” or “plateau
