“A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life.” (New York Times best-selling author Peter Nichols) A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named “Ardi” – a human ancestor far older than Lucy – a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution. In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White – ”the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology” – uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy”, then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution – how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee – and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.