"Ardi"

Ardi, we hardly knew ye. And here you have been, lingering in our subconscious for, now let's see, how does four-point-four million years sound? You've been a long time coming to our attention. And until you did we've been labouring under the obviously erroneous conception that we've been descended from apes; chimpanzees and gorillas, to be more precise.

But no, we have now been apprised by evolutionary biologists that we much, much earlier than we might have ever dreamed, tangentially removed ourselves from that inheritance. That you, our most currently-identified ancestor, deviated from that strain that resulted in hominids in one fork of the divide, and apes on the other, some 6 to 9 million years ago. Amazing.

Still, Charles Darwin was right, wasn't he? And so too are his successors in the science, pointing out to us that every living thing on this Earth of ours shares some very primitive genetic material. We are all evolved from a common source. Hardly surprising, come to think of it. Nature, after all, has her little secrets, and this perhaps isn't one of them.

Ethiopia; imagine. The cradle of - if not civilization, which it most certainly might not wish to present itself as, but rather - the development of humankind. Lucy must have been your grandchild, hundreds of thousands of generations removed, dating from 3.2 million years. And isn't it odd that paleoanthropologists' discoveries have unearthed female fossilized bones to reconstruct our primal history?

Welcome, Ardipithecus ramidus, to our pantheon of revered ancestors; we owe you much.