A new look at human evolution

Amazing! I discovered this article on MSNBC.com and I truly hope you read it. I have always been a believer in evolution, and Darwin’s theory inspired a deep interest in how humans really “evolved”. In this article, you will see that evolution does not mean that we evolved from some sort of monkey or ape, but that humans and apes have a common ancestor.

My personal thoughts on human evolution have been challenged recently in my biology class. Due to the fact that, while I do believe humans evolved, I could never articulate my beliefs on the matter in such a way as to not sound like I was saying we evolved from monkeys. My beliefs were that we came from some common creature that as time went by, some of these “ancestors” evolved and changed and become apes, and some evolved into what we now call human.

This article really places a firm foundation under my beliefs now, and I feel that when I speak of evolution now, I can refer back to both Darwin’s theory, and now the discovery of Ardi, “a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia”.

“In Ardipithecus we have an unspecialized form that hasn’t evolved very far in the direction of Australopithecus. So when you go from head to toe, you’re seeing a mosaic creature that is neither chimpanzee, nor is it human. It is Ardipithecus,” said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ardi is 1 million years older than Lucy, whose remains were also found in Africa. Until the discovery of Ardi, Lucy was the oldest skeleton discovered and studied. Ardi is not the common ancestor of humans and apes, but he is as close as we can get today. He is a huge discovery for the study of human evolution.