Local filmmaker Rod Paul has been working on a project with the Discovery Channel for the past decade.
If that sounds like a long stretch, consider the subject matter is more than 4 million years old.
"Discovering Ardi" premieres on the Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. Sunday. It documents the discovery and research into a 4.4 million-year-old partial female skeleton found in 1994 in the Ethiopian desert.
The network explains that the remains are "the oldest skeleton from our (hominid) branch of the primate family tree," and predate the 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton nicknamed "Lucy."
Ardi, short for Ardipithecus, was a woodland creature with a small brain, long arms, and short legs, the Discovery Channel says. She could walk and climb trees, and her discovery helps scientists better understand how our evolutionary forebears came to walk upright.
"The novel anatomy that we describe in these papers fundamentally alters our understanding of human origins and early evolution," Kent State University professor C. Owen Lovejoy, the project anatomist and evolutionary biologist, said in a statement.
Added University of California Berkeley professor Tim White, the project co-director and paleontologist: "Ardipithecus is not a chimp. It's not a human. It's what we used to be."
"Discovering Ardi" is the product of a 10-year partnership between the Middle Awash research project and locally-based Primary Pictures. Paul is the firm's director and executive producer. His son David Paul, who also worked on the project, is Primary Pictures' supervising producer.
Rod Paul was out of the country Friday, but David Paul characterized the long process of producing the documentary as exhausting but exhilarating.
"It's satisfying to be done with it," David Paul said. "It's an honor and privilege to get to work with these scientists."
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