Apes descended from Humans – NOT the other way around.

Man didn’t descend from apes. What is closer to the truth is that our knuckle-dragging cousins descended from us.

That’s one of the shocking new theories being drawn from a series of anthropology papers published Friday in a special edition of the journal Science.

Scientists say a 4.4-million-year-old fossil called Ardi – short for ardipithecus ramidus – is descended from the “missing link,” or the last common ancestor between humans and apes.

The 4-foot, 110-pound female’s skeleton and physiological characteristics bear a closer resemblance to modern-day humans than to contemporary apes, meaning they evolved from human-like creatures – not the other way around.

The partial skeleton “is probably the most important find we have had yet,” says Owen Lovejoy, one of the primary authors on the journal package.

“It’s transformative. This is a lot closer to anything that you’d call the missing link than anything that’s ever been found,” says Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Ohio’s Kent State University.

Among other things, research on Ardi suggests humans are far more primitive in an evolutionary sense than today’s great apes – like chimps and gorillas – which have continued to evolve from the missing link.

“In a way we’re saying that the old idea that we evolved from a chimpanzee is totally incorrect,” he says. “It’s more proper to say that chimpanzees evolved from us.”

Lovejoy says chimps experienced more profound evolutionary changes in their backs, pelvises, limbs, hands and feet as they adapted to life in the trees than the hominid line of upright species that evolved into humans.


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