A comprehensive and long-awaited study of the Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton, discovered in 1994, was published in 2009. The study revealed 'Ardi' was not a chimpanzee-like creature but a mosaic of primitive and derived traits that lived in a woodland environment, not a savanna. This work provided crucial new insights into the anatomy, locomotion, and ecology of our earliest ancestors and confirmed that living African apes are not a good model for the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

The full analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton provided a remarkably detailed picture of an early hominid, challenging long-held assumptions about human evolution. It showed that the last common ancestor was not chimpanzee-like and that our earliest ancestors lived in the woods, not the open savanna. This has inspired a more nuanced and scientifically grounded poetic vision of human origins, one that embraces the complexity and surprising nature of the fossil record.