Posted April 20th, 2006 07:54 PM IPFrom the American Scientist newsletter (stuff in the current issue):
Found in Afar: Fossil That Fills in Holes of Human Evolution
Scientists digging in the Afar Desert region of Ethiopia unearthed fossils that they believe show a direct evolutionary link between Australopithecus afarensis—think of the famous Lucy, believed to be a human ancestor—and a more primitive, apelike species called Ardipithecus ramidus. The newly turned-up bones and teeth, which date to about 4.1 million years ago, split the chronological difference between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus, and also act as a neat anatomical bridge between the two. The find was reported in last week's issue of the journal Nature.
Paleontologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues are calling the newly found species Au. anamensis. White also discovered Ar. ramidus. In fact, fossils from all three species were found in the Middle Awash valley in Ethiopia's Afar Desert, which is a strong tip-off to the evolutionary transition from Ardipithecus to Australopithecus.
"The key here is the sequences," White said. "It's about a mile thickness of rocks in the Middle Awash, and in it we can see all three phases of human evolution."
Nearby, the team also found evidence of petrified wood and fossils of monkeys and horned animals, suggesting that the species lived in heavily forested areas. That means that "a big part of the life history of the early hominids was in the forest," Ethiopian fossil hunter Alemayehu Asfaw told the San Francisco Chronicle by e-mail. "As we can see it now, at least 3 million years of hominid evolution was in the closed woodlands, so hominids started walking upright in the forest, not in the open.""I was talking to my therapist and she said, "Would you rather hurt yourself or someone else?" And I started to say "myself" but then I thought she didn't want to hear that. So I told her that I would hurt someone else. That seemed more sane."
