Early humans lived in a river-margin forest in a wooded grassland landscape in Ethiopia, according to a study published in Nature Communications by University of New Orleans researchers M. Royhan Gani and Nahid D. Gani. This finding is in contrast to the previous interpretation of early humans living in a woodland environment far from a river. Knowledge of the habitat of early humans is crucial to answering the questions of early human evolution, including the development of bipedalism—walking on two legs.
Royhan Gani, UNO assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, and Nahid Gani, an assistant professor of research at UNO and a professor of practice at Tulane University, studied the habitat of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million year old hominin (early human) found in Aramis, Ethiopia. The researchers interpreted the data to suggest the presence of major rivers and river-margin vegetation. This would place Ar. ramidus in a river-margin habitat part of an otherwise savannah landscape. Understanding the landscape inhabited by Ar. ramidus will help assess the different theories for the development of early humans.
The paper, “River-margin habitat of Ardipithecus ramidus at Aramis, Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago,” appears today in Nature Communications, an online-only, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, physical and chemical sciences.
To read the paper, visit: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html.