Was Ardi, the oldest hominid skeleton, a human or an ape?
London, May 28 : A debate has erupted over the classification of Ardipithecus ramidus – popularly called Ardi – as to whether it was more human or an ape. Researchers are questioning the classification of the oldest hominid skeleton – dated at 4.4 million years old, reports Nature. The argument isn”t an esoteric dispute among palaeontologists, but speaks to a fundamental theory of human evolution: that hominids began walking upright in response to the spread of grasslands in eastern Africa less than 8 million years ago. While the papers from White and colleagues showed a bipedal species with ape-like feet and arms living in woodlands, and not knuckle-walking like a chimpanzee, Matt Sponheimer, an archaeometrist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who peer reviewed the isotopic comment for Science, argues otherwise. “This is not a simple issue to answer, “”We don”t want to throw the savannah hypothesis out prematurely. We need broader samples over a longer period of time,” he say
