Ardi is a 4.4-million-year-old fossil female, considered a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, was bipedal but reported to have lived in woodlands. That threw into doubt the great savannah myth of human origins. Not long after, came the “backlash”, as writer Jill Neimark puts it, when other authorities contended that she did live on the savannah, but in the meantime,
Terry Harrison, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, questioned in Nature whether Ardi was even a member of the human lineage or just an ape “among the tangled branches” of a much larger bush. And University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun also had doubts. “Ardi may be an early side branch of hominids that is not directly related to humans,” he says.
And the beat goes on. Not to worry, we are told, “That’s how good science works.”
Which is all to the good except for the billionnaire-funded TV and ta- funded lobbies who insist that we take the latest froth from the pot as “the truth about our origins.”
The truth about our origins is self-evidently that no one knows the truth about our origins.