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Tim D. White (born August 24, 1950) is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.He is best known for leading the team which discovered Ardi, the type specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor.
A. kadabba is considered to have been the direct ancestor of A. ramidus, making Ardipithecus a chronospecies. [7] The exact affinities of Ardipithecus have been debated. White, in 1994, considered A. ramidus to have been more closely related to humans than chimpanzees, though noting it to be the most ape-like fossil hominin to date. [1]
Ardipithecus ramidus was discovered by Tim White in 1992 at Aarmis in Middle Awash. The initial assemblage was made up of 13 dental fragments, some cranial fragments, some postcranial fragments, including from the radius and ulna. Since, over 100 total specimens have been discovered from 36 individuals.
The first fossil found was dated to 4.4 million years ago on the basis of its stratigraphic position between two volcanic strata: the basal Gaala Tuff Complex (G.A.T.C.) and the Daam Aatu Basaltic Tuff (D.A.B.T.). [7] The name Ardipithecus ramidus stems mostly from the Afar language, in which Ardi means "ground/floor" and ramid means "root".
The Middle Awash is a paleoanthropological research area [1] in the northwest corner of Gabi Rasu in the Afar Region along the Awash River in Ethiopia's Afar Depression.It is a unique natural laboratory for the study of human origins and evolution and a number of fossils of the earliest hominins, particularly of the Australopithecines, as well as some of the oldest known Olduwan stone ...
He has been instrumental in the discoveries of the type specimen (principal reference fossil) for Australopithecus garhi and Ardipithecus kadabba (both discovered in 1997), and he has also found fossil specimens of Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis, and species of Homo including Homo erectus, as well as Homo sapiens.
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The find was overshadowed by Tim D. White's 1995 discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, which pushed back the fossil record to . In 2000, Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut discovered, in the Tugen Hills of Kenya, a 6-million-year-old bipedal hominin which they named Orrorin tugenensis.