Saturday, October 24, 2009

Omrit - Herod's mystery temple?

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Middle East & Israel Breaking News » Local Israel » Around Israel » Article

Sep 19, 2009 3:04 | Updated Sep 21, 2009 17:07
Omrit - Herod's mystery temple?
By STEPHEN G. ROSENBERG
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On a good day, you can see it from a distance. It stands proudly on a ridge below a higher peak at a site where you would least expect to see a fine Roman structure. Although it lies in ruins, the white structure stands out in a landscape of black basalt rocks, typical of the Golan. Before 1967, it was the site of a Syrian military bunker.

Khirbet Omrit (the Arabic name) rests on the border between the Galilee and the Golan, on what was the boundary between civilization and barbarity. At first, during the Roman occupation of Palestine, the Galilee was also a wild and unruly area where the young Herod was sent to restore order. He did this with his usual ruthless brutality, not allowing humanity to stand in the way of good order. As a result of his success, his masters in Rome saw he was suited to become King of Judea. Later this cruelly successful mode of operation also gained him rule over the Golan, which was added to his kingdom in about 30 BCE.

Herod remembered this border territory, the site of his early triumph, and came back one day to build a temple to his patron, the Emperor Augustus. According to the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, after Caesar granted Herod the territory of the local governor who had died, "he [Herod] erected for him [Augustus] a beautiful temple in white stone in the territory of Zenodorus, near the place called Paneion [today, Banias]" (Antiquities 15: 363).

This white stone building at Omrit stands in the middle of nowhere today, but this was not so in antiquity. Recent excavations have shown that it stood alongside the Roman road from Tyre to Damascus, where it was joined by the route from Scythopolis (Beit-She'an) to Damascus. The temple stood high above the road and was joined to it by an avenue of columns that led to a bridge across the wadi Al-Hazin, which the road followed.

A colonnaded way means a road of shops, and that means commercial activity - here associated with travelers as well as locals. Omrit was a way-station on the road to Damascus, the seat of the senior Roman procurator who supervised Syria, which included Palestine.

Herod built three temples in honor of his patron Augustus. One stood at Sebastia (Samaria) and a second one at Caesarea. Where was the third? Some archeologists think it was at Banias itself, but that city was dedicated to the god Pan.



Andrew Overman of Macalester College in the US thinks the temple was at Omrit. Overman has been digging at the site for nearly 10 years and sees in the remains all the unique characteristics and high quality of Herod's methods of building. Like the other two temples, Omrit was approached by a grand flight of stairs that led to a portico of six columns and onto the cella, or enclosed shrine, which would have housed a statue of Augustus, as the Romans considered him a god. It is perhaps significant that the temple faced west, toward Rome and the emperor, and in front of the temple there was a paved area with an altar that would have been used for libations in his honor.

The high quality of the stonework, laid in headers and stretchers without mortar, and the finely carved capitals all point to the work of Herod the Great. So does the concept itself, of an isolated temple standing impressively on a high podium on a prominent ridge to make it visible and even overpowering from afar.

The excavators found that there was a second stage of the construction, which surrounded the original structure with a colonnade of eight columns on each side and six at the rear, which would have made the temple even more impressive. The original columns were of the Ionic order, consisting of spiral ends, while the new colonnade was of the Corinthian order, carved with elaborate acanthus leaves, all in fine Roman style, based on Greek originals.

This expanded temple is dated to about 100 years later than the original and may have been ordered by Herod's grandson Agrippa II, who ruled the area of Gaulanitis (Golan) from 54 CE to 66 CE. It shows the continued importance of the location well after the time of Herod, and even after the Jewish Revolt of 66 CE, which destroyed much of Jewish life in the Galilee. It may well reflect the importance of the Golan to the Galilee refugees of the revolt.

All the work of the temple is in shining white limestone, which would have had to be imported into this area of black basalt rocks. The local primitive buildings of the time are all in the local basalt, but although that was easily available, it was hard and difficult to work. Herod and his grandson used limestone to good effect. It was unusual for the area, it gleamed white in the sunlight and it shone from afar. It was also much easier to carve than basalt, and the stonemasons had to carve six Ionic capitals and then 20 Corinthian ones, all in intricate detail.

The carved stonework was not the only decoration. Internally the early cella was painted with frescoes. The later work revealed inscribed fragments, one with the Greek letters "Aphro," standing for the goddess Aphrodite, and marble reliefs of a priest with a cornucopia, of a slain deer attacked by another beast, and of a sphinx.

The temple probably stood for many years while the character of the site slowly changed to commercial and industrial use, and the temple site and stonework may have been used to create a chapel, where two crosses in black basalt were found.

The late Roman remains show an active village site, perhaps an early Judeo-Christian community, thriving alongside an active trade route to Damascus and the coast.

The temple-shrine may have come to an end after the severe earthquake of 363, but life continued in the Byzantine period until the massive quake of 749, which destroyed so many of the buildings in the Golan. The site was then abandoned, but a few late remains of the 13th century were found, with crude houses and cooking equipment - perhaps a camp of semi-nomads and their animals seeking refuge from the more regulated areas of the Galilee. By then, however, the Roman roads had been abandoned, and the area returned to its original wild state, which it retains today.

Friday, October 23, 2009

‘Lucy’ Species Ate a Different Diet

than Previously Thought

Research examining microscopic marks on the teeth of the “Lucy” species Australopithecus afarensis suggests that the ancient hominid ate a different diet than the tooth enamel, size and shape suggest, say a University of Arkansas researcher and his colleagues.

“The Lucy species is among the first hominids to show thickened enamel and flattened teeth,” an indication that hard, or abrasive foods such as nuts, seeds and tubers, might be on the menu, Ungar said. However, the microwear texture analysis indicates that tough objects, such as grass and leaves, dominated Lucy’s diet.

“This challenges long-held assumptions and leads us to questions that must be addressed using other techniques,” Ungar said. Researchers thought that with the development of thick enamel, robust skulls and large chewing muscles, these species had evolved to eat hard, brittle foods. However, the microwear texture analysis shows that these individuals were not eating such foods toward the end of their lives.
The researchers used a combination of a scanning confocal microscope, and scale-sensitive fractal analysis to create a microwear texture analysis of the molars from 19 specimens of A. afarensis, the Lucy species, which lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago, and three specimens from A. anamensis, which lived between 4.1 and 3.9 million years ago. They looked at complexity and directionality of wear textures in the teeth they examined. Since food interacts with teeth, it leaves behind telltale signs that can be measured. Hard, brittle foods like nuts and seeds tend to lead to more complex tooth profiles, while tough foods like leaves generally lead to more parallel scratches, which corresponds with directionality.

“The long-held assumption was that with the development of thick enamel, robust skulls and larger chewing muscles marked the beginning of a shift towards hard, brittle foods, such as nuts, seeds and tubers,” Ungar said. “The Lucy species and the species that came before it did not show the predicted trajectory.”

Next they compared the microwear profiles of these two species with microwear profiles from Paranthropus boisei, known as Nutcracker Man that lived between 2.3 and 1.2 million years ago, P. robustus, which lived between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago, and Australopithecus africanus, which lived between about 3 million and 2.3 million years ago. They also compared the microwear profiles of the ancient hominids to those of modern-day primates that eat different types of diets.

The researchers discovered that microwear profiles of the three east African species, A. afarensis, A. anamensis and P. boisei, differed substantially from the two south African species, P. robustus and A. africanus, both of which showed evidence of diets consisting of hard and brittle food.

“There are huge differences in size of skull and shape of teeth between the species in eastern Africa, but not in their microwear,” Ungar said. “This opens a whole new set of questions.”

Monday, October 19, 2009

The historical importance of Jerusalem's geology

Jerusalem's geology has been crucial in molding it into one of the most religiously important cities on the planet, according to a new study.

It started in the year 1000 BCE, when the Jebusite city's water system proved to be its undoing. The Spring of Gihon sat just outside the city walls, a vital resource in the otherwise parched region. But King David, intent on taking the city, sent an elite group of his soldiers into a karst limestone tunnel that fed the spring. His men climbed up through a cave system hollowed out by flowing water, infiltrated beneath the city walls, and attacked from the inside. David made the city the capital of his new kingdom, and Israel was born.

In a new analysis of historical documents and detailed geological maps, Michael Bramnik of Northern Illinois University will add new geological accents to this pivotal moment in human history in a presentation Tuesday, October 20 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland.

"The karst geology played a major role in the city's selection by David for his capital," Bramnik said.

It proved to be a wise decision. One of David's successors, King Hezekiah watched as the warlike Assyrian horde, a group of vastly superior warriors toppled city after city in the region. Fearing that they'd soon come for Jerusalem, he too took advantage of the limestone bedrock and dug a 550 meter-long (1804 feet) tunnel that rerouted the spring's water inside the city's fortified walls.

The Assyrians laid siege to the city in 701 BCE, but failed to conquer it. It was the only city in history to successfully fend them off.

"Surviving the Assyrian siege put it into the people's minds that it was because of their faith that they survived," Bramnik said. "So when they were captured by the Babylonians in 587, they felt it was because their faith had faltered."

Until then, the Jewish religion had been loosely associated. But that conviction united the Jews through the Babylonian Captivity, "and so began modern congregational religion," Bramnik said.

In an arid region rife with conflict, water security is as important today as it was during biblical times. While the groundwater for Jerusalem is recharged surface waters in central Israel, other settlements' water sources are not publicly available for research. Bramnik's efforts to find detailed hydrological maps were often rebuffed, or the maps were said to be non-existent.

"I think Jerusalem's geology and the geology of Israel is still significant to life in the region, perhaps even reaching into the political arena," he said.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

700 Aramaic Documents From 500 B.C.





New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in many parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis.

“We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew,” said Annalisa Azzoni, an assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Azzoni is a specialist on ancient Aramaic and is now working with the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute. “There are words I know were used in later dialects, for example, but I didn’t know they were used at this time or this place, Persia in 500 B.C. For an Aramaicist, this is quite an important discovery.”

Clearer images delivered more quickly
Scholars from the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California helped the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project build and install an advanced electronic imaging laboratory at the Oriental Institute. Together, the two projects are making high-quality images of the Aramaic texts and the seal impressions associated with those texts. They are distributing the new images to the international research community through the Internet.

Inked and incised texts pose different problems that call for different imaging solutions. Making high-resolution scans under polarized and filtered light reveals the ink without interference from stains and glare, and sometimes shows faded characters that cannot be seen in ordinary daylight. Using another advanced imaging technique, called Polynomial Texture Mapping, researchers are able to see surface variations under variable lighting, revealing the marks of styluses and even the traces of pens in places where the ink itself has disappeared.

Distributing the results online will give worldwide communities of philologists and epigraphers images that are almost as good as the original objects―and in some cases actually clearer than the originals―to study everything from vocabulary and grammar to the handwriting habits of individual ancient scribes.

Researcher Marilyn Lundberg and her colleagues from the West Semitic Research Project built two Polynomial Texture Mapping devices from scratch at the Oriental Institute. They trained Persepolis Fortification Archive Project workers in using them, and also in using filtered light with a camera equipped with a high-resolution scanning device. Now a stream of raw images is uploaded every day to a dedicated server maintained by Humanities Research Computing at Chicago, then uploaded for post-processing at the University of Southern California. Fully processed imagery is available on InscriptiFact, the online application of the West Semitic Research Project, and in the Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment, the online application of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project.

Seeing the whole picture
The Polynomial Texture Mapping apparatus looks a bit like a small astronomical observatory, with a cylindrical based topped by a hemispherical dome. The camera takes a set of 32 pictures of each side of the tablet, with each shot lit with a different combination of 32 lights set in the dome. After post-processing, the PTM software application knits these images to allow a viewer sitting at a computer to manipulate the apparent direction, angle and intensity of the light on the object, and to introduce various effects to help with visualization of the surface.

“This means that the scholar isn’t completely dependent on the photographer for what he sees anymore,” said Bruce Zuckerman, Director of the West Semitic Research Project and its online presence, InscriptiFact. “The scholar can pull up an image on the screen and relight an object exactly as he wants to see it. He can look at different parts of the image with different lighting, to cast light and shadow across even the faintest, shallowest marks of a stylus or pen on the surface, and across every detail of a seal impression.”

“This is a wonderful way to look at seal impressions,” said Elspeth Dusinberre, another Persepolis Fortification Project collaborator. Dusinberre, an associate professor of classics at the University of Colorado, is studying the imagery and the use of seals impressed on the Aramaic tablets. “Some of the impressions are faint, or incomplete, on curved surfaces or damaged surfaces. Sometimes Aramaic text is written across them. You need to be able to move the light around to highlight every detail, to see the whole picture.”

The Persepolis Fortification Archive also includes about 10,000 to 12,000 other tablets and fragments with cuneiform texts in Elamite―a few hundred of them with short secondary texts in Aramaic. There are also about 4,000 to 5,000 others with impressions of seals, but no texts, and there are a few unique documents in other languages and scripts, including Greek, Old Persian and Phrygian.

“That’s what makes this group of Aramaic texts so extraordinary,” Stolper said. “From one segment of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, the Elamite texts, we know a lot about conditions around Persepolis at about 500 B.C. When we can add a second stream of information, the Aramaic texts, we’ll be able to see things in a whole new light. They add a new dimension of the ancient reality.”

Impacts are far-reaching
The collaboration between the Oriental Institute at Chicago and the West Semitic Research Project at Southern California began with support from a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2007. To date, the teams have made high-quality images of almost all the monolingual Aramaic Fortification tablets. The next phase of the work, supported by a second Mellon grant that runs through 2010, will make images of the short Aramaic notes written on cuneiform tablets, seal impressions on uninscribed tablets and previously unrecorded Elamite cuneiform texts.

The tablets have been studied since they came to Chicago in 1936, and many of them have been sent back to Iran. Oriental Institute scholar Richard T. Hallock published about 2,100 of the Elamite texts in 1969, and Margaret Cool Root and Persepolis Fortification Archive Project collaborator Mark Garrison are completing a three-volume publication of the impressions made on those documents by about 1,500 distinct seals.

These publications have had far-reaching results. “They have transformed every aspect of modern study of the languages, history, society, institutions, art and religion of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,” Stolper said. “No serious treatment of the empire that Cyrus and Darius built and that Alexander destroyed can ignore the perspectives of the Fortification Archive.”

“If that is the effect of a sample of one component of the archive,” added Garrison, “imagine what will happen when we can have larger samples and other components, and not just the written record, but the imagery, the impressions made by thousands of different seals that administrators and travelers―the men and women who figure in the texts―employed.”

By 2010, the collaborating teams expect to have high-quality images of 5,000 to 6,000 Persepolis tablets and fragments, and to supplement these with conventional digital images of another 7,000 to 8,000 tablets and fragments. The images will be distributed online as they are processed, along with cataloging and editorial information.

“Thanks to electronic media, we don’t have to cut the parts of the archive up and distribute the pieces among academic specialties,” said Stolper. “We can combine the work of specialists in a way that lets us see the archive as it really was, in its original complexity, as one big thing with many distinct parts.”

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Studying Pompeii's Graffiti

Uncovering the Graffiti of Pompeii
Released: 10/8/2009 3:00 PM EDT
Today, a kid spray painting a wall with graffiti would probably get arrested.

But 1,900 years ago in Pompeii, Italy, everybody was doing it. They wrote on the exteriors of houses up and down the street, in bath houses and in kitchens. Everything was fair game.

Rebecca Benefiel, assistant professor of classics at Washington and Lee University, has spent the last three years studying the more than 11,000 graffiti in Pompeii. "It's the only site where we have an entire city's worth of these messages," she said.
The graffiti present a combination of writing and drawings, with writing being the more common form of expression. Benefiel said she sees the graffiti as the voice of the people and a lens through which to view ancient society.

For example, while history has not treated the Emperor Nero kindly, he was in fact very popular with the locals in Pompeii. Benefiel came across numerous graffiti saying "Neroni Feliciter," which roughly translates into "Long Live Nero."

Of the 100 graffiti praising the different emperors, Benefiel estimates more than half were for Nero. "He was incredibly popular and people loved him. I found a lot of the graffiti at the entrances to houses of the wealthy (who would have had a stake in declaring their support of the imperial regime). But I also found them in places like kitchens and hallways where they could have been put up by servants of the house or slaves. However, after Nero kicked his pregnant wife, killing her and the baby, his popularity waned. But even so, the people didn't go back and erase all their previous declarations of love."

It's the sort of discovery that fascinated and enchanted Benefiel about ancient graffiti.

Interest in the subject has also been surging among other academics. In the past three years, four conferences have been devoted to the topic. By fall 2009, Benefiel will have spoken at three of them.

You would think that graffiti nearly 2,000 years old would have been studied extensively by now and that there would be little left to write about.
The reality is that Benefiel is one of few scholars to really study this ancient graffiti of Pompeii. "The graffiti were basically ignored because as one scholar put it, "The graffiti are not written by the kind of people we are most interested in meeting,'" explained Benefiel.

She first came across them in 2005 while researching her dissertation. "They were fundamentally interesting, and I realized that the majority of them had never been studied," she said.

A major international project begun in the late 1800s documented and cataloged all the Latin inscriptions from the ancient world in every country. Benefiel had worked earlier with stone inscriptions from Rome, but since coming to W&L has focused her studies on the wall-inscription from Pompeii. "They contain a wealth of details about popular culture of the Roman Empire," she said.

Benefiel added that it was fortunate that the graffiti had been recorded, because many of them have now vanished as the wall plaster they were written on has crumbled.

Two-thirds of Pompeii has been uncovered and is now deteriorating from exposure to strong sunlight, rain, creeping vegetation and tourists. Benefiel said that the authorities have been putting a great effort into preserving the city in the last few years. "But you're probably not going to see any brand-new excavations any time soon, for that reason," she said.

Pompeii is unique in its preservation of life as it was in 79 A.D., when Mount Vesuvius erupted. It buried the city with a light pumice stone called lapilli that gradually covered the houses to about the second story during a period of 36 hours. "You can easily shovel the lapilli into a bucket," said Benefiel. "In a matter of days you've got a whole building cleared."
This means the first stories of buildings are very well preserved, and that is where Benefiel carries out some of her research.

"I really do love Pompeii," she said. "You can walk through the spaces and feel that people lived here. You can go into someone's garden or latrine and you know this space because it's familiar. You're standing in someone's house. It's wonderful for that sense of immediacy."

These ancient houses all faced inward with an internal court containing a pool and gardens. That left a blank façade facing the street, explained Benefiel, and plenty of space for writing graffiti on what was seen as a public space. In fact all façades of buildings could be written on in every street.

"These walls were huge message boards," said Benefiel. "What's really fun is how interactive the graffiti was. It's fascinating because it shows how engaged the people were in the writing process. They were reading the messages around them and writing responses."

Benefiel found messages of love exchanged between a man (named Secundus or "Second") and a woman (named Prima, or "First") who lived at different ends of a city block.
She discovered a poetry competition with eight messages. "Someone starts off quoting a verse of poetry, and then someone else adds to it and so forth. It's very interactive and you can see that there are different styles of handwriting."
Benefiel explained that the graffiti is incised into the wall plaster and all anyone would need was a sharp implement. "It was pretty easy to carve the stucco," she said.

Ardi Walked In The Woods

Among the many surprises associated with the discovery of the oldest known, nearly complete skeleton of a hominid is the finding that this species took its first steps toward bipedalism not on the open, grassy savanna, as generations of scientists – going back to Charles Darwin – hypothesized, but in a wooded landscape.

Ambrose analyzed the teeth of two-dozen mammal species found in the same ancient soil layer as Ardipithecus in order to help reconstruct its environment. A modern hippopotamus tooth is pictured. |

“This species was not a savanna species like Darwin proposed,” said University of Illinois anthropology professor Stanley Ambrose, a co-author of two of 11 studies published this week in Science on the hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus. This creature, believed to be an early ancestor of the human lineage, lived in Ethiopia some 4.4 million years ago.

One of the crucial pieces of evidence to show that Darwin didn’t get it right, Ambrose said, was the analysis of carbon isotopes in the soil and in the teeth of Ardipithecus and other animals that lived at roughly the same time and in the same location.

The mass of carbon atoms in the atmosphere varies, and during photosynthesis, trees and tropical grasses absorb different proportions of carbon-12, the most common carbon isotope, and carbon-13, which is rare. These isotopes pass into the soil and into the bodies of animals that eat the plants, making it possible to accurately reconstruct the proportions of grass to trees on the landscape and in the diets of the animals that lived there.
Ambrose analyzed stable carbon isotope ratios in the soil in which the bones of 36 Ardipithecus individuals were found. He also analyzed the teeth of five Ardipithecus individuals and 172 teeth of two-dozen mammal species found in the same ancient soil layer.

The fossil-bearing layer, in the Afar Rift region of northeastern Ethiopia, spans a broad arc about 9 kilometers long. Sandwiched between two layers of volcanic ash that both date to about the same age, it provides a well-focused snapshot of an ancient African ecosystem.

The carbon isotope ratios of the soils indicated that in the time of Ardipithecus the landscape varied from woodland in the western part of the study zone to wooded grassland in the east. None of the Ardipithecus specimens were found in the grassy eastern part of the arc.

“Fossils of many species are common all the way across the landscape,” Ambrose said. “But this species is missing in action from the east side of the distribution.”

Isotopic analysis of teeth found on the site gave a more complete picture of the habitat of the animals that lived and died there, Ambrose said.

“The distribution of plant carbon isotope ratios conveniently separates out grasslands from forests,” he said. “And it also separates out grazing animals, like zebras, from browsing animals that eat the leaves off of trees, like giraffes.”

The distribution of the fossil browsers and grazers echoed that of the habitat, he said.

“On the west we find lots of Ardipithecus fossils and they’re associated with a lot of woodland and forest animals,” he said. “And then there’s a break; Ardipithecus and most of the monkeys that live in trees disappear, and grass-eating animals become more abundant.”

The carbon isotope ratios of the Ardipithecus teeth also tell the story of a woodland creature, he said.

“The diet of the Ardipithecus is much more on the woodland and forest side,” he said. “It’s got a little bit more of the grassland ecosystem carbon in its diet than that of a chimpanzee but much less than its fully bipedal savanna-dwelling descendents, the australopithecines.”

This evidence, along with the anatomical studies indicating that Ardipithecus could walk upright but also grasped tree limbs with its feet, suggests that this early hominid took its first steps on two legs in the forest long before it ventured very far into the open grassland, Ambrose said.

“Multiple lines of evidence now suggest that they were beginning to leave the trees before they left the forest,” he said.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Ardi displaces Lucy as oldest hominid skeleton

Ethiopian desert yields fossils that paint new picture of human evolution

Nearly 17 years after plucking the fossilized tooth of a new human ancestor from a pebbly desert in Ethiopia, an international team of scientists today (Thursday, Oct. 1) announced their reconstruction of a partial skeleton of the hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which they say revolutionizes our understanding of the earliest phase of human evolution.

The female skeleton, nicknamed Ardi, is 4.4 million years old, 1.2 million years older than the skeleton of Lucy, or Australopithecus afarensis, the most famous and, until now, the earliest hominid skeleton ever found. Hominids are all fossil species closer to modern humans than to chimps and bonobos, which are our closest living relatives.

"This is the oldest hominid skeleton on Earth," said Tim White, University of California, Berkeley, professor of integrative biology and one of the co-directors of the Middle Awash Project, a team of 70 scientists that reconstructed the skeleton and other fossils found with it. "This is the most detailed snapshot we have of one of the earliest hominids and of what Africa was like 4.4 million years ago."

White and the team will publish the results of their analysis in 11 papers in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Science, which has Ardi on the cover. They announced their findings at press conferences held simultaneously today in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The team's reconstruction of the 4-foot-tall skeleton and of Ardi's environment – a woodland replete with parrots, monkeys, bears, rhinos, elephants and antelope – alters the picture scientists have had of the first hominid to arise after the hominid line that would eventually lead to humans split about 6 million years ago from the line that led to living chimpanzees.

Based on a thorough analysis of the creature's foot, leg and pelvis bones, for example, the scientists concluded that Ardi was bipedal – she walked on two legs – despite being flat-footed and likely unable to walk or run for long distances.

In part, this primitive ability to walk upright is because Ardi was still a tree-dweller, they said. She had an opposable big toe, like chimpanzees, but was probably not as agile in the trees as a chimp. Unlike chimps, however, she could have carried things while walking upright on the ground, and would have been able to manipulate objects better than a chimp. And, contrary to what many scientists have thought, Ardi did not walk on her knuckles, White said.

"Ardi was not a chimpanzee, but she wasn't human," stressed White, who directs UC Berkeley's Human Evolution Research Center. "When climbing on all fours, she did not walk on her knuckles, like a chimp or gorilla, but on her palms. No ape today walks on its palms."

Ardi's successor, Lucy, was much better adapted for walking on the ground, suggesting that "hominids became fundamentally terrestrial only at the Australopithecus stage of evolution," he said.

Based on Ardi's small, blunt, upper canine teeth, the team also argues that the males of that species did not engage in the same fearsome, teeth-baring threat behavior common in chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Instead, they must have had a more amicable relationship, the scientists said, implying that several pair-bonded couples lived together in social units. Males may even have helped in gathering food for sharing.

"The novel anatomy that we describe in these papers fundamentally alters our understanding of human origins and early evolution," said anatomist and evolutionary biologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, a scientist with the project. In a summary article in Science, Lovejoy wrote that these and other behaviors "would have substantially intensified male parental investment – a breakthrough adaptation with anatomical, behavioral, and physiological consequences for early hominids and for all of their descendants, including ourselves."

Until now, the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor was the 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of Lucy, discovered in the Afar depression of Ethiopia, near Hadar, in 1974 and named Au. afarensis.

In 1992, however, while surveying a site elsewhere in the Afar, near the village of Aramis, 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa, Middle Awash Project scientist Gen Suwa discovered a tooth from a more primitive creature more than 1 million years older than Lucy. After more fossils of the creature were found in the area from some 17 individuals, Suwa, White and project co-leader Berhane Asfaw published the discovery in the journal Nature in 1994.

Although that first paper initially conservatively placed the chimp-like creature in the Australopithecus genus with Lucy, the team subsequently created a new genus – Ardipithecus – for the hominid because of the fossils' significantly more primitive features.

After preparing their first report, the scientists continued to find more Ar. ramidus fossils in the Aramis area. A hand-bone discovered in 1994 by project scientist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a paleontologist and curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, eventually led the team to the partial skeleton now known as Ardi, which they excavated during three subsequent field seasons. The skeleton was disarticulated and scattered, and broken into smaller pieces: 125 fragments of skulls, teeth, arms, hands, the pelvis, legs and feet. In addition to this skeleton, the area yielded a total of 110 other catalogued specimens representing body parts of at least 36 other Ardipithecus individuals.

After the bones were excavated at the site, they were molded and painstakingly removed from their protective plaster jackets in the laboratory in Addis Ababa, where they were then photographed and reconstructed. Micro-CT scanners were used to study the inner and outer anatomy of the bones and teeth, and scanning electron microscopes were used to study the structure and surface details. The 5,000 micro-CT slices through the broken skull allowed the team to reconstruct it on a computer and then "print" it on a 3-D stereolithic printer at the University of Tokyo. A cast of Ardi's skull, along with video and comparisons, can be seen now in the Human Evolution display on the second floor of UC Berkeley's Valley Life Sciences Building.

In all, 47 scientists from 10 countries contributed to the 11 Science papers, providing detailed analyses of the feet, pelvis, teeth and general anatomy of Ar. ramidus and reconstructions of the geology and biology of the area where Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago. Two of the papers analyze more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils – including 6,000 individually catalogued vertebrate fossils – to reconstruct the large and small mammals and birds of the area. Among these are 20 species new to science, including shrews, bats, rodents, hares and carnivores.

"We had to do a lot of work to bring this world back to life, but by merging the skeletal information with the data on biology and geology, we end up with a very, very high-resolution snapshot of Ardi's world," White said. "It was a very cold case investigation."

CTs of the tooth enamel, for example, revealed that Ardi was an omnivore, eating a diet different from that of living African apes, such as chimps, which eat primarily fruit, and gorillas, which eat primarily leaves, stems and bark. The team suggests that Ardipithecus spent a lot of time on the ground looking for nutritious plants, mushrooms, invertebrates and perhaps small vertebrates.

It wasn't until 1 million years after Ardi that hominids like Lucy were able to range extensively into the savannas and develop the robust premolar and molar teeth with thick enamel needed to eat hard seeds and roots. One of these species then started scavenging and using stone tools to butcher larger mammals for meat, "paving the way to the evolution and geographic expansion of Homo, including later elaboration of technology and expansion of the brain," White said.

White said Ardi, who probably weighed about 110 pounds, had a brain close to the size of today's chimpanzees – one-fifth that of Homo sapiens – and a small face. Males and females were about the same size. The hominid's lack of resemblance to either chimp or modern humans indicates that the last common ancestor of apes and humans looked like neither, he said, and that both lines have evolved significantly since they split 6 million years ago.

White admits that the relationship between Ar. ramidus and the Australopithecus fossils the team has found about 80 meters higher in the strata of the Ethiopian desert is tentative. Nevertheless, he said Ardi's species could be the direct ancestor of Lucy's species, which could be the direct ancestor of modern humans. Without additional fossil evidence, however, connecting the individual or species dots is hazardous, White said.

"Ardipithecus ramidus is only known from this one productive site in Ethiopia," White said. "We hope others will find more fossils, in particular fossils from the period of 3-5 million years ago, to test this hypothesis of descent."