Skull & Bone: The Sahelanthropus’ iconic bone head and his ill-fated thigh
Image: Didier Descouens (CC BY-SA 4.0), Franck Guy / PALEVOPRIM / CNRS
Modern man has evolved seven or eight million years. Now researchers are throwing themselves into a spectacular question: Did the earliest pre-humans walk on two legs – or not?
Sahelanthropus tschadensis – the name is program. The team led by the French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet from the Université de Poitiers not only wanted to honor the region in northern Africa, where in July 2001 they found a skull that was only twelve centimeters high along with three jawbones and a few teeth in the desert sand. “Anthropus” is the Latinized version of the Greek word for “man”. With the naming, Brunet and his colleagues wanted to express their conviction that they had not encountered an ape here.
At first, that would have been obvious. The skull, also known as “Toumaï”, could barely fit the brain of a chimpanzee, but above all the layer of loamy sandstone on which it weathered in the Djurab desert in northwestern Chad is seven million years old. The death of that being and the sedimentary embedding of its skeletal remains are more than twice as long ago as the earthly existence of the famous Ethiopian pre-human lady “Lucy” and is close to the time when our ancestral line separated from that of the chimpanzees, our closest phylogenetic relatives among the animals alive today. From her 2002 in Nature So, from their published analysis of the skull, the Brunet team concluded that Sahelanthropus was part of our hominin lineage—and not that of the great apes—and, more importantly, that it was already walking on the ground like humans, as bipeds. While not necessarily our direct ancestor, he was the first creature known to display a trait unique to our lineage.