Aramis in brief
Aramis is a fossil site on the banks of the Awash River in Ethiopia’s Afar region, in an area called the Middle Awash. The Afar rift is one of the best places in the world to find fossils of early human relatives, because its layers of sand, mud and volcanic ash have been eroding for millions of years, exposing old bones on the surface. Aramis is one of the sites where the sediments are old enough to hold the earliest records of the human family.
Discovery
The first fossils were found at Aramis in 1992 and 1993 by a team led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, with Berhane Asfaw and Gen Suwa. Suwa spotted a few teeth, and the team then recovered pieces of a skeleton. In November 1994 Yohannes Haile-Selassie, then a graduate student, found a hand bone, and the team went on to find more parts of a single individual. Their first description, in Nature in 1994, named the find Australopithecus ramidus. It was later moved to the genus Ardipithecus.
Ardi
The best-known find from Aramis is Ardi (ARA-VP-6/500), a partial skeleton of an adult female Ardipithecus ramidus. The team published the full description in 2009 in a set of papers in Science. Ardi is about 4.4 million years old, around 1.2 million years older than Lucy.
The 2009 description reported more than 110 specimens from sediments about 4.4 million years old, including a partial skeleton with much of the skull, hands, feet, limbs and pelvis. Ardi combined climbing in trees with a form of upright walking more primitive than that of Australopithecus. She had a reduced canine and premolar set and ate mainly plants that use the C3 photosynthetic pathway, in a largely woodland habitat. The team concluded that the ancestor humans and chimpanzees last shared probably differed substantially from any living African ape. Other researchers read the same evidence differently.
Other finds
Aramis is part of a wider group of sites in the Middle Awash, which has also produced fossils of other early hominins and of ancient animals. Herto, in the same Middle Awash study area, is where the skulls of early Homo sapiens about 160,000 years old were found in 1997.
Visiting
Aramis is in a remote part of the Afar region, far from the main roads, and it is not open to visitors. Ardi’s remains are kept at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, where casts and displays about human evolution can be seen.
Why Aramis matters
Aramis shows that by about 4.4 million years ago there were already human relatives that walked upright and lived in a mix of woodland and open ground. It gives researchers the earliest well-preserved picture of the lineage that led to the australopiths, and so to Lucy and later humans. The site is also a reminder that much of our early history is still poorly sampled, because each new find changes the story.
Sources
- White, T. D. and others (1994). Australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia. Nature 371: 306 to 312.
- White, T. D. and others (2009). Ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids. Science 326: 75 to 86.
- White, T. D. and others (2003). Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423: 742 to 747.