Ardi: the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor

Witness History

In 1994, a college student called Yohannes Haile Selassie unearthed a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton in Ethiopia.

She was the first near-complete skeleton of a species of human ancestor called Ardipithecus ramidus. The paleoanthropologists who discovered her called her Ardi. The discovery upended how scientists view human evolution.

Yohannes Haile Selassie speaks to Ben Henderson.

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(Photo: Yohannes Haile Selassie in the Afar desert, Ethiopia. Credit: CMNH/Woranso-Mille Project)