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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.
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.
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]
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".
Between 1992 and 1994, a team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White discovered the first Ardipithecus ramidus (nicknamed "Ardi") fossil in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia, dating to 4.4 million years ago. Subsequently, 100 fossil specimens of Ardi were uncovered.
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.
Pictured is a lump of 66-million-year-old vomit found on the Cliffs of Stevns, a geological site on the Danish island of Zealand that is comprised of a 15 km-long fossil-rich coastal cliff.
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.