4.4 Million Years Old, 15 Years of Work, 11 Science Papers, 1 Fossil

Having 11 papers at once in Science is almost unheard of (especially when they're all by the same group of authors!). It's reserved for Human Genome Project level efforts.

So what's the big deal?

A prof at Berkeley (Tim White) and his team discovered a fossil (Ardipithecus) more than 15 years ago. It's a rare partial skeleton which sheds light on a branch of primate evolution (the human/chimp common ancestor) that we haven't had much direct physical evidence about. Seems they have opposable big toes among other interesting features.

Over the last 15 years, White & co. only allowed their collaborators to look at it, and others in the field have gotten annoyed and accused him of hoarding the find. See a representative dustup from a few months back:

http://anthropology.net/2009/08/25/science-suffers-from-the-...

Fast forward to a few days ago. Science publishes this monster issue dedicated to the find. It sets the whole paleoanthropology world atwitter.

http://www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/

Here's some further commentary:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/ardipithecus/ardipithecu...

And now you're up to date, at least on the "inside science" aspects of this.