It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution-how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee-and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.įossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White-"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"-uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region.
A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"-a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.
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