Ardi Poem by gershon hepner

In fossil-fertile Ethiopia
they’ve found a hominid much older
than Lucy, diamond cornucopia.
I think that I’d have called her Golda
to link her to the Lucy whom
the Beatles have immortalized,
and would not, I for one assume,
have in the least way been surprised
to learn that her ancestress had
been found, but they have called her Ardi,
who, whether fossil lass or lad,
no longer lives, like Thomas Hardy,
far from the madding crowd, beneath
the soil, but has been excavated,
and by her fossil bones and teeth,
by anthropologists been dated.

They claim that nearly 4.4
million years ago she used
to walk, and greatly would adore
all trees that with fresh fruit were juiced.
The name she didn’t use when swishing
from tree to tree I’ll tell those readers
who for such data may be wishing.
She Ardipithecus ramidus,
but I will always think of her
as Ardi, in the forest waiting
for other hominids who were,
like her, although undated, dating.

Adam Gorelick writes in the Stanford Report about a 4.4 million year old hominid which ahs been discovered in Ethiopia:

When David DeGusta was a graduate student sorting monkey fossils in an Ethiopian desert in 1995, he had no idea what payoff – if any – his work would have.But after spending much of his time over the next five years in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, and another six years as an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford analyzing the African fossils he collected, DeGusta finds himself part of a major discovery that sheds new light on one of the earliest phases of human evolution.DeGusta is a co-author on two of 11 papers that appear in a special issue of the journal Science on Friday, Oct.2, showing how hominids – the earliest human ancestors – made their way from living in trees to walking on two legs. Much of the evidence is contained in fossils of three dozen 4.4-million-year-old hominids dubbed Ardipithecus ramidus (or 'Ardi, ' for short) . The Ardi fossils, which include a partial skeleton, are more than a million years older than the 'Lucy' skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, which was discovered in 1974. Nearly 10,000 animal fossils, such as the monkey, antelope and lizard remains that DeGusta analyzed at Stanford, help give a picture of what Ardi's habitat looked like.For decades, most scientists thought early humans went through an evolutionary period of knuckle-walking, like chimpanzees. And previous research pointed to open grasslands as the place where hominids learned to walk. But DeGusta and his colleagues – led by Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at UC Berkeley – draw on almost two decades of research to paint a much different portrait of early human evolution and environment.


10/1/09