'Ardi', Ardipithecus ramidus, is announced

On 1 October 2009 an international team led by Tim White published in the journal Science a set of papers on Ardipithecus ramidus, based on a partial skeleton nicknamed Ardi that his team had found from 1994 at Aramis in the Afar region of Ethiopia. About 4.4 million years old, a million years older than Lucy, the 120-centimetre female could walk upright on the ground, though she retained a grasping big toe for climbing trees. The find suggested that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans did not look like a chimpanzee. Ardi lived in woodland and not on open savannah, as was once supposed.

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