'Ardi' voted scientific breakthrough of the year

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Ardi - cousin of the 'missing link' - named scientific breakthrough of 2009
The discovery of a short, ape like creature, that lived more than four million years ago just as humans began walking on two legs was the most important breakthrough of the year, according to one of the most prestigious science magazines.
By Richard Alleyne,
Science Correspondent
18 Dec 2009
telegraph.co.uk

Ardi - a seven stone, four-foot tall female who roamed African forests 4.4million years ago- was the oldest member of the human family tree found so far, pre-dating the previous ancestor "Lucy" by a million years. Her discovery, reported in October, sheds light on a crucial period when we were just leaving the trees.

Her skeleton, found in Ethiopia, promises to fill in gaps about how we became human and evolved from apes. It has already reversed some common assumptions of evolution. Rather than humans evolving from chimps, the find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved together from another common, more ancient ancestor. While she was not exactly this "missing link", she was described as its "cousin".

Naming Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus or 'root of the ground ape' - as the Breakthrough of the Year, Science journal, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said it "changed the way we think about early human evolution".

Ardi's discovery topped a list of 10 major landmarks that the magazine, which has more than a million readers, deemed were the most important of the year. They included the finding of water on the moon, the repair of the Hubble Space Telescape, developments in gene therapy and the detection of pulsar gamma ray emissions from outer space.