Today on Science's Origins blog, I report on the first public debate over the significance of Ardipithecus ramidus, the candidate human ancestor and subject of a detailed series of reports--covering 108 pages--in the 2 October issue of Science. In a nutshell, primatologists are taking issue with the "Ardi" team's contention that chimpanzees are no longer good models for the last common ancestor between that species and our own, Homo sapiens, which went their separate evolutionary ways at least 5 million years ago. The debate unfolded at a meeting last week of the Royal Society in London, entitled "The First 4 Million Years of Human Evolution," at which yours truly was in attendance.Give it a read, you'll be glad you did (and if you have any questions you can ask them in the Comments section of this blog.)
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Thank you for all your thoughtful replies. What I said was, that I never thought that humans were "descended from chimps", but rather -- at one time, at least -- I assumed they were descended from some apparently chimplike common ancestor. The work on Ardi suggests that this supposition was wrong, because Ardi,even if you don't know much about primates(and I have to admit I don't), she certainly isn't "chimplike", whatever else she may have been. So I wasn't really saying that the ancestor had to look like a chimp, just that it had to recognizably look like an ape(never mind what kind of ape! This is what I would be interested in having answered(what sort of ape the common ancestor might have been, whether or not it resembled any living representative of the great apes).
Anne G