WE WAITED 15 years to meet her. Last week, the remains of Ardi – a 4.4-million-year-old hominid – were finally revealed to the world. Her first act: to force a rethink of our links with modern primate cousins.
Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, first discovered the female Ardipithecus ramidus in Ethiopia in 1994 and has spent the years since analysing her remains and those of 35 contemporaries. Ardi, he says, was a 120-centimetre-tall female who lived about a million years before Lucy – the famous hominid found in Ethiopia in 1974 – roamed the planet. She weighed about…
