Remember all that nonsense, and of course you do, about the gorgeous ancient monkey fossil from Germany that was supposed to change everything but which only had a madman-caliber publicity engine behind it? Today finds breaking news on something that won’t change everything but is important enough to compel most paleoanthropologists to sit up, call their colleagues, and huddle in eager convocation to sort out its meaning. And maybe hustle out new editions of text books. It certainly prompted a lot of science reporters to make it their week’s big story.

Usually, news gushers over reports in Science Magazine aren’t tracked till Friday. But so many outlets put up big accounts on their web pages as soon as the embargo expired at 10:30 eastern US time today that it’s hard to resist. It’s also hard to recall a news event with so many familiar bylines, the front line troops of daily science writing, mustering at once. This post is so long I might as well try to make it comprehensive on coverage, so please forward links to additional, significant accounts by journalists.

The animal is of a species called Ardipithecus ramidus. The news is that more than 15 years after a scientific team led by among others Tim White at UC Berkeley announced it had a fantastic new ancient hominid fossil from Ethiopia to report and then pretty much shut up about it, the bones have been meticulously liberated from their stony matrices, reassembled, and analyzed. Other specimens of the same species and genus have been found and studied too. The journal carries a slew of papers by dozens of authors, many themselves from Ethiopia. Its examiners say the genus appears to have been somewhere on or near the main stem of evolution toward later Australopithecine and Homo species.

Surprise: The reconstruction looks different in many ways, from tooth to toe, from what had been expected of such an early ancestor.

It’s an upright walking (more like shambling), tree dwelling, more or less monogamous, and very un-chimplike creature. Dunno if a paradigm is tottering but hypotheses are in flux regarding the habitat and evolutionary pressures that started the genomic nudge toward us. While we may be descended abstractly from the ape clade, it now appears that no modern ape is a good representation of what morphed directly into Lucy and eventually us. A lot of iconic cartoons of human evolution may require prompt redrafting.

Several stories’ heds may mislead readers into thinking this is a new discovery. Those readers had better peruse the stories. Plenty of news over the years has reported its existence, age, and potential to shake things up. What is new is the detailed description. The stories themselves make that sequence clear.

Early Stories:

• NY Times – John Noble Wilford: Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy; the lede: Lucy, meet Ardi. Good account of other, scanty fossil evidence that calls for overhaul of the family tree’s branching points. His lede might also have said, Forget Ida , that good looking 47 million year old monkey that many already have a hard time recalling.
• Cleveland Plain Dealer – John Mangels : Cleveland researchers say fossil find overturns thinking on human evolution ; Local authors of some reports make this a local story for Mangels. Great job capturing the secrecy and pent-up frustration among outside experts as the team for so long kept a cone of silence over its work. One thinks the year in the lede, 1994, should be 1992? Correx late: No, he got it right. /’92 was a tooth, ‘94 the big set of bones.
• AP: Randolph E. Schmid: Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found ; He has one top-notch paleontologist, who didn’t even write any of the new reports, calling it one of the most important discoveries in the history of human evolution.
• Wall St. Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Fossils Shed New Light on Human Origins ; He puts up high it’s not just one specimen, but one great specimen and bits and pieces of three dozen in all.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: The oldest known prehuman revealed ; No, not Dave. He’s the oldest known active-duty daily science writer (yes, still 90) and, one notes, is among the few reporters to have visited White and reported on his and his colleagues’ excavations in Ethiopia just a couple of years ago ;
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: 4.4 million year old hominid skeleton ‘Ardi’ discovered in Ethiopia ; Good enough on big picture, misses entirely the unusual secrecy of the study.
• BBC -Jonathan Amos: Fossil finds extend human story ;
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne : New fossil moves story of mankind back one million years ; Sigh. Not that new a fossil.  Headline writers just don’t read the stories very deeply sometimes.
• Weird hed award, ditto in spades for the lede: UPI: Study: Man did not evolve from apes ; Hmmm – where to start on this brief item…?
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Human evolution just got 1 million years older: Man-ape fossil skeleton is closest thing yet to ‘missing link’ ; I guess this is like using the useless missing link term without actually quite using it ; And the lede does it even better, referring to the “mythical missing link.” Having it both ways, this does. However, the on line story includes a superb selection of illus and once you get past the  missing links, the lively, informed text is admirably detailed.
• NPR All Things Considered – Christopher Joyce: Move Over Lucy, Ardi May Be Oldest Human Ancestor ;
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Oldest human ancestor skeleton unveiled ;

*UPDATES (late Oct 1):

• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Fossils radically alter ideas  about the look of man’s earliest ancestors ; This is among the early arrivals I should have spotted first time around. Maugh writes it nicely with a wide perspective not only about the A. ramidus’s form but the environment it occupied, and puts a sensible stress on the rarity of finding a hominin fossil so complete – of any age.
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick, Andrea Dorfman: Excavating Ardi: A New Piece for the Evolution Puzzle ;  Another one, as that one bullet up, with some veteran reporting that indicates familiarity with the saga that went into the analysis and a long wait, apparently worth it, for results.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Discovery in Ethiopia casts light on human origins ;
• AAAS/ScienceNOW: Anne Gibbons: Ancient Skeleton May Rewrite Earliest Chapter of Human Evolution ; Superb rundown, as expected from Gibbons and from inside the journal. One might amend the quote she picked up, declaring “We thought Lucy was the find of the century…” That’s actually pretty much true, but she was the find of the last century. Ardi was found then, too, of course – but recognition is 21st century.

UPDATES (Oct 2):

• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: ‘Ardi’ May Rewrite Story of Humans ;
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Anne McIlroy: Meet Ardi, a mother to all humanity ; This one pays tribute to the sheer work by researchers to reassemble the old gal..the lede: “Her bones were so fragile some of them crumbled with they were touched…parts of her skeletons had been broken into more than 100 pieces.” And, she adds, when put back together she is “far more revolutionary than her younger relative”  (Lucy).
• 

  The new picture

  Toronto Star – Joseph Hall: Did apes descend from us? ; This hed and the lede capture one of the more provocative hints by Ardi – that she resembles, but perhaps is more bipedal, the common ancestor to the hominid line and today’s apes. Thus the knuckle walking trait is derived, not primitive, and it now seems to have arisen after the pongids split from our collective line. So maybe it’s the apes that made the radical plunge into new anatomy, not the Australopithecine-Homo clade. And we’re the primitive ones, sort of.  OK, but then comes the colloquial nomenclature conundrum. Why that common ancestor is “us” and not “that primate” is a problem for a Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps, to figure out.  Plus, one asks: how can this be so and yet square with gene evidence we are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas? Another puzzler : even though a noted paleoanthropologist says it in this story as a metaphor, nobody has ever really asserted in a literal sense that we evolved from actual chimps.

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: 4.4 million-year-old fossil could reshape human origins ; Makes the point clear: It’s chimps and gorillas that are special. Most of us (brain, e.g., excepted) is primitive.
• Boston Globe: Carolyn Johnson: Scientists announce discovery of earliest prehuman skeleton ;
• Xinhua – Xiang Zhang:  Humans didn’t evolve from chimpanzee-like ancestors ;
• Columbus Dispatch – Doug Caruso: Newest fossil shakes the tree ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Jamie Shreeve: Ardi’s Secret: Did Early Humans Start Walkng for Sex? ; Nice expansion on the sex angle – but which also leads one to wonder whether apes got down on their knuckles for some reason that can be construed as sex? Seems like everything in evolution comes down to that.
• Wired – Brandon Keim: Humanity Has New 4.4 Million-Year-Old Baby Mama ; Nice quote: “The field will go into a frenzy.”

And a Few Fine Blogs:

• Washington Post Achenblog – Joel Achenbach: Ain’t No Missing Link ; a well-informed reporter muses and imagines.
• Discover/The Loom – Carl Zimmer: Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last ; Nice phrase: this is “slow-cooked science.” Which means, he says for this case, science done right. He skillfully ties this fossil in with Lucy, via Tim White, and points out this is just the start of discussion about this specimen and its immediate lineage. Zimmer walks readers through the papers’ highlights, in plain and lucid English.

Grist for the Mill:

UC Berkeley Press Release ; Stanford U. Press Release ; AAAS/Science Press Release ;

Pic: cover image © T. White, 2008

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.