Technically they’re probably further. Chimpanzee generation-times are shorter than ours, so while we’re Ardipithecus’ great-to-the-power-of-200000-nephews and nieces, modern Chimps are the great-to-the-power-of-300000-nephews and nieces.

(Numbers pulled from a hat, but you get my point.)

The general explanation has always been something along the lines that chimpanzee’s live primarily in wooded habitats that aren’t conducive to fossilization. This is true, but is a rather inelegant explanation. I do have to wonder whether some “hominid” fossils may be chimp/gorilla ancestors. Not Ardi, but I’m thinking more along the lines of boisei and robustus (whichever genus they’ve now been placed in, if I remember correctly they were moved out of Australopithecus).

As you mention, there’s no reason why every hominid fossil necessarily represents a direct ancestor of ours, but there’s also no reason why they couldn’t also represent ancestors on the chimp or gorilla lines. This is especially interesting in light of the hypothesis that our common ancestor may have been more resemblant of humans (or at least, would not have resembled modern chimps or gorillas).

Just food for thought.

It appears your web journalism skepticism wasn’t up to snuff when you saw the Examiner article. Calling it reporting is generous. The Examiner is just citizen blogging targeted at individual markets for advertising. He picked his own headline and he is certainly not a journalist.

Please post some more of the best science reporting you’ve come across on this topic.

http://www.dawgtalkers.net/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/603782/page/0/fpart/1/vc/1

Admittedly it is a Cleveland Browns message board, so if bad football is offensive to you, do not proceed

These few predictable goons aside, this research on Ardi is simply fascinating, and I can’t wait to read more about it as future work is published over the next few years.

This lack of understanding of evolution is very common. It’s the misconception that new species arise and split off from static, stagnant species that stay the same into modern times and never not evolve.

Some people seem to think that the theory is that X million years ago there were chimpanzees, and some of them split off and eventually developed into modern humans and the rest stayed chimps, and there should be transitional forms from chimp to modern man rather than both chimps and humans having transitional forms back to a common ancestor that was neither chimp nor man.

Indeed, on a pure plausibility basis, there’s no reason why modern chimps couldn’t have evolved from a common upright ancestor that evolved from a non-upright ancestor. Whales evolved from land mammals which evolved from sea creatures.

Another common misconception is that evolution and natural selection necessarily lead to increasingly “sophisticated” species.

I’ve heard people speculate what modern intelligent dinosaur descendants would look like today if they hadn’t been wiped out. I ask why should we assume they would have developed intelligence if they had not been wiped out. They were doing very well for themselves “fat, dumb, and happy” before something changed faster than they could adapt to it, and they died out.