Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy,” then the oldest known human ancestor. In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White–“the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology”–uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named “Ardi”–a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.
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