Scientists believe that new data released about an Ethiopian fossil find will force us to rethink our evolutionary route. They say it will also make us question the image of our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and the chimp's evolutionary route too. This stunning new information - which is released within a series of 11 articles in today's issue of Science magazine - breaks down the anatomy of the 'Ardi' fossil, the oldest such evidence of human ancestry. The 4.4 million year old bones point to a strange creature, and very different to the the vision we generally hold of a half-man/half-ape species.

CHIMPANZEES - OUR CLOSEST LIVING RELATIVE

It is widely considered that chimpanzees are our closest living evolutionary relatives that have managed to survive on the planet. Most scientists will agree that somewhere between six and eight million years ago the branch of the family tree which humans evolved from, broke away from that of the chimp, but that it was much further down the line that Human Beings themselves evolved. From about 200,000 years ago experts say that we first came to be, and before this time they usually paint a picture of a primitive ape-like creature which both chimps and humans can find their distant origins in, but Ardi (scientific name: Ardipithecus ramidus) is challenging some of the basics of that theory. About 30 members of the species were found, but most of the data relates to one female who had the most complete skeletal remains, and she has been named 'Ardi'. The 4.4 million old species had developed some level of upright walking, and from it's hands, scientists were able to say that it lived in the woods, and not on flat barren ground. These are very important findings when taken in context.

FOSSIL HISTORY OF HUMANS

Whilst we have many fragments of humans from throughout the recent past, when you look back into history at any sort of distance, into pre-human times, the picture is actually quite muddy. Before this Ethiopian find, the oldest fossil which we can say with any degree of surety belongs to the family line which produced us humans, was Lucy, a 3.2 million year old fossil which was also found in Ethiopia. Lucy proved that before large brains were evolved, our predecessors had walked upright, and now Ardi takes that notion back a further million years. This means we are getting back close to where we branched off from the chimps, and our ancestors were already walking upright. This, Science Magazine believes, could point to the possibility of chimps actually evolving ground-walking attributes independently after humans and chimps went off in their own evolutionary directions, with the distant relatives which link both species being upright-walking. Now that sounds weird!

FOSSIL HISTORY OF CHIMPS

The problem with the natural history of chimps, is that we have no real evidence of their development. They are said to have lived in areas of the World which were not great for preserving their remains, and to date the oldest fossil of a chimpanzee which we have got is about half a million years old, so we really cannot say with certainty if chimps evolved from more human-like creatures, or if we evolved from more ape-like creatures, but Ardi seems to point to a mutation of some sort. An unknown combination which we could not have dreamed of, but that will open our eyes.

THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS...

With data relating to half a million years of chimpanzees' and 4.4 million years of humans' ancestry to mull over, and with the knowledge that we both took different evolutionary routes from about 6-8 million years ago, surely the evidence suggests that, from our still unknown common ancestor, chimps may have evolved to as different a species as we are considered to be from our own distant ancestors. They may not have stagnated as we sometimes like to think. If you are interested in finding out more about Ardi, go check out this video on the Science Magazine website to hear some more from their experts about this find, and what the data suggests.