Hand prints made 10,000 years ago at Cueva de los Manos, Argentina; photo by James P. Blair

"The Flintstones" TV show premiered on September 30th, 1960. While there is no evidence of dinosaur-powered machinery, other intriguing evidence has been found about prehistoric people. To celebrate the Flintstones and Rubbles of history, find out what is known about their migrations, life, and death, and see what a real Wilma Flintstone may have looked like. Then take an online quiz to test your knowledge about Neanderthals, and yell yabba dabba do!

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• The latest news from Nationalgeographic.com, by Ker Than: did volcanoes kill off Neanderthals?
• Blog posts about the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings, by Andrew Howley.
• 2008 October -- National Geographic magazine. Last of the Neanderthals. 34-59. Stephen S. Hall reports on the discovery in 1994 of Neanderthal bones in a cave in northern Spain. These bones of at least nine Neanderthals have provided scientists with clues about how they lived and died, and allowed artists Adrie Kennis and Alfons Kennis to reconstruct a Neanderthal woman, down to skin and hair; reconstruction photos by Joe McNally. Photos by David Liittschwager show the evidence gathered by scientists.
• 2005 August -- National Geographic magazine. Hands Across Time: Exploring the Rock Art of Borneo. 32-45. Deep within the cliffside caves of eastern Borneo, 10,000-year-old paintings featuring the hands of the artists themselves may offer clues about ancient migrations. Luc-Henri Fage reports on the expedition to the caves and what this art might tell us about the people; Carsten Peter photographs the haunting images by artists unknown.

Lee Berger brought attention back to South Africa's amazing record of human fossils after the end of Apartheid. Here he examines a bone fragment in a cave in the islands of Palau in the Pacific Ocean. Despite that project's unhappy ending, Berger remains one of the most active and enthusiastic paleoanthropologists. Photo by author.

This week's announcement of a new species of human ancestor from South Africa will start another round of debates in paleoanthropology. Whether the fossils named Australopithecus sediba represent a new species and whether they have been assigned to the right group will be questioned, as well as whether or not they have anything to do with the human lineage that led to us. This week's announcement will also be another chance for Lee Berger, an American paleoanthropologist whose career has been marked by what to many other scientists would have been knock-out blows from the media and his peers.

NGS grantee Yohannes Haile-Selassie, shown here at his dig in Ethiopia at Woranso-Mille, was the discoverer of the most complete specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus at nearby Aramis in 1994. He also discovered Ar. ramidus's 5.5 to 5.8 million-year-old ancestor, Ar. kadabba. Photo © Liz Russell, courtesy of Yohannes Haile-Selassie.

Today the world will witness the long-awaited roll out of Ardipithecus ramidus. And what a roll out! This new member of the hominin lineage has features that are quite unexpected because they are unlike what we see in living great apes, which share common ancestry with humans. A whole issue of Science is devoted to this creature and the work of a dedicated group of scientists who spent many years in the desolate Middle Awash project area of the Afar depression in Ethiopia.

I've had the pleasure of meeting many of the Middle Awash team members over the years. Among them are many Ethiopians who started their careers in the Middle Awash more than 15 years ago as bright, dedicated students. Now they are PhDs who are spread throughout the world at prestigious institutions making significant contributions to science, not the least of which are the many papers being announced today concerning the anatomy and environment of Ardipithecus ramidus.

Buried in these scientific papers is a significant mention that may pass right by many readers. In the paper entiltled "Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids," the authors mention how in the early 1990s, after much looking, they were only finding scrappy bits of early human fossils at Aramis. They go on to say, however, that "... on 5 November 1994, Y.H. S. collected two hominid metacarpal fragments (ARA-VP-6/5001a and b) from the surface of an exposed silty clay..." Those hand bones were the first bits found of what would become the substance of much of today's press announcement—the most complete skeleton of an adult early hominin since the discovery of Lucy, the australopith, in 1974. Who is its discoverer, Y.H.S.? It was none other than Yohannes Haile-Selassie, one of the Ethiopian students I mentioned.

The big news in the journal Science tomorrow is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton—a small-brained, 110-pound female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed “Ardi.” She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous “Lucy” fossil, found in the same region thirty-five years ago.

Buried among the slew of papers about the new find is one about the creature’s sex life. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you like learning why human females don’t know when they are ovulating, and men lack the clacker-sized testicles and bristly penises sported by chimpanzees.

One of the defining attributes of Lucy and all other hominids—members of our evolutionary lineage, including ourselves—is that they walk upright on two legs. While Ardi also walked on two legs on the ground, the species also clambered about on four legs in the trees. Ardi thus offers a fascinating glimpse of an ape caught in the act of becoming human.

The problem is it is doing it in the wrong place at the wrong time—at least according to conventional wisdom, which says our kind first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and onto open savanna grasslands. At the time Ardi lived, her environment was a woodland, much cooler and wetter than the desert there today.

So why did her species become bipedal while it was still living partly in the trees, especially since walking on two legs is a much less efficient way of getting about?