An ancient leg bone found near the famed skull of a human ancestor is providing new evidence that our lineage may have been walking upright 7 million years ago.
The chimp-size skull looked most like an African ape. But its teeth suggested something different—its canines resembled those of later hominins, or members of the human family. The shape of the opening at the base of its skull—the foramen magnum—suggested, similar to upright walkers such as today’s humans.
But a skull alone can’t prove a species walked upright. Toumaï needed legs. It turns out it had one that had been overlooked: In 2004, a then–master’s student at Poitiers, Aude Bergeret, spotted the shaft of a thighbone and a lower arm bone in a drawer full of fossils of animals labeled “indeterminate” by the team that found the skull. She alerted her adviser, who identified it as the thighbone of a primate and looped in Brunet.
The current team members, who were not part of the analysis initially, say there were other priorities at the time to analyze the skull and find more fossils in Chad. But others say it was curious that it was such a low priority. In the new study, this team of French and Chadian researchers used a battery of methods to analyze the internal and external structure of more than 20 traits in the bones. When they compared those traits and measurements with living and fossil apes and hominins, they found the orientation of the base of the femur’s neck and the flattening of the upper part of the bone resembled those of hominins, or members of the human lineage, but not the thighbones of African apes.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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