One of the outcomes of the Discovery Channel’s documentary “Discovering Ardi” is that Creationists are considering the discovery of Ardipithecus Ramidusas a verification of what they believed all along. The fossils discovered in Ethiopia reveal Ardipithecus Ramidus to resemble modern humans in much more aspects than previously thought. Carbon Dating puts the fossils to be 4.3 million years old. Creationists argue that such an old creature must be more of an ape than a human as the Darwinian Theory holds but it is not the case, so they might be correct in their beliefs about the absurdity of the Darwinian Theory.
However paleontologists view that the Ardi just shows that human like traits developed much earlier than previously thought. Ardi’s fossil reveals the creature to be a tree climbing herbivore. However it was bipedal meaning he walked on his legs rather than like apes on its all fours.
It took the excavation team in Ethiopia 3 years to fully recover the fossilized parts of Ardi in 1997. The effort was shared by the scientists around the globe, as the pieces were recovered. Jay Matternes started putting the pieces together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to bring Ardi a 4.3 Million years old female back to life. As the drawing was completed, Ardi was remarkably human like. Ardi is the oldest homind fossil discovered to date and it surely has rewritten some of the most cherished theories paleontologists believed, like our ancestors were not bipedal. It appears that hominids started on a different line of evolution at the very beginning of the cosmic drama.
Ardi Discovery Channel
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