A university professor at Kent State University said today that apes, in many ways, evolved from humans, and not the other way round.
Dr C. Owen Lovejoy, a biological anthropologist specializing in the study of human origins, said: “It has been a popular idea to think humans are modified chimpanzees. From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or ‘Ardi’ we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas.”
Lovejoy reconstructed the skeleton of “Lucy” a fossil of a human ancestor over three million years old. But Ardi walked the planet a million years before “Lucy”, said Lovejoy.
Lovejoy and Ardi
Ardi, said Lovejoy, provides real answers to questions about the origin of species. Tomorrow he will release 11 papers that formally describe the partial female skeleton of Ardi.
Presumably both humans and apes descended from a common ancestor. It will be interesting to see what Professor Lovejoy has to say tomorrow.
