Fifteen years ago in Ethiopia, back in 1994, a new species of extinct ape was discovered. Ardipithecus ramidus, or ‘Ardi’ for short has been the name given to a particular female specimen. You may have heard of this find recently, as the story has been doing the rounds with print press and online media. However, what you might not have heard, thankfully, is the slightly ridiculous coverage of Ardi from some outlets.

The Associated Press (AP) writers are well known for mistakes in public science reporting, and these mistakes are to be expected, even with a big find like Ardi. From Yahoo news though, you get this rather strange quote:

“This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.”

What makes this quote bizarre is that surely this was already common knowledge? That chimps and humans evolved had a very distant common ancestor, but apparently this reverses the common wisdom of human evolution? Not particularly sure what the writer there was getting at there.

Then you get the National Geographic website, which one would assume to be a more respectable area of science reporting, describing the find as ‘disproving’ the missing link. Anyone who is familiar with the scientific understanding of the evolution of humans, has to endure frustration every time a so called ‘missing link’ is mentioned. The term ‘missing link’ is used nearly every occasion a new species is discovered, they can’t all be the missing link surely. This is due to the nature of evolution being more of a lattice of evolutionary branches. To imply that we are going to discover one fossil in particular that fills all the gaps in the fossil record is preposterous, every fossil is a missing link, fills it’s niche gap, but at the same time creates two gaps either side of the gap you just filled. Evolution is a slow process. We will most likely never discover every single species of ape over millions of years, in a nice perfectly laid out chronological line, leading to our particular brand of African Ape Homo Sapiens. Fossils are hard to come by, and you could say we are lucky to have found any at all.

From here, the science reporting only gets worse, up to the point of full out evolutionary denial. The well known biologist blogger extraordinaire PZ Myers (of the blog Pharyngula), brought attention to an article by Metro News in Canada. Metro news declare that the find of Ardi, shows that man did not descend from apes. Which of course is a pretty bold statement, considering that we are a class of african apes. Instead Metro ‘news’ states this as one of many controversial new theories, implying that instead that our knuckle dragging cousins evolved from “us”, or human like creatures. This of course is going to drive creationists wild with excitement, at the thought of disproving evolution. The comments below the article show two comments from Muslim creationists, proclaiming that this shows the Koran as being the truth when it comes to matters of human origins.

This brings us to the worst of the news reporting on Ardi, by the middle eastern news agency Al-Jazeerah. An arabic fan of Richarddawkins.net, reported that Al-Jazeerah had reported in arabic, that the new find of Ardi ‘disproves’ Charles Dawins theory of evolution. A quick read of the translated article, shows just about the worst science reporting from a major news agency I have ever seen, or will probably ever see. Apparently Ardi forces out the old assumption of man being evolved from a monkey. Who knew.

Dr. Zaghloul El-Naggar, an apparent ‘professor’ of geology in a number of Arab universities, exclaims that Westerners had come to their senses “after they were dealing with the origin of man in terms of material and the denial of religion.”

The good ‘professor’ of geology goes on to say that the age of Ardi at 4.4 million years old, is incorrect as well, as the age of the earth does not exceed 400,000 years. The madness continues with another proclamation that apparently this proves that humans could not have possibly evolved from monkeys or gorillas. In a round about way the ‘professor’ is right, humans could not have possibly evolved from monkeys or gorillas. It’s a good job then that no scientist has ever claimed that. The term ‘common ancestor’ is completely lost on these people.

Ardi is an important find, and it does fit into current evolutionary knowledge quite nicely thank you. Ardipithecus ramidus just reinforces currently widely accepted theories of hominid lineage, that the common ancestor we seek with chimpanzees is further back then 4.4 million years (6-7 million years being the most commonly accepted time), which was never a controversial view to start with.