Early human find: The first pedestrian

Twenty years ago, a small skull made headlines that had been found the year before, in July 2001, in a desert in the North African state of Chad and interpreted as belonging to a previously unknown pre-human form.

Their discoverers around the French paleanthropologist Michel Brunet from the Université de Poitiers called them "

" in their publication at the time.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The sensation was, on the one hand, the comparatively good state of preservation of the fossil skull bone and, on the other hand, its enormous age of seven million years.

For comparison: The earliest fossils of representatives of our own species

are only around 300,000 years old.

The famous "Lucy" from Ethiopia lived 3.2 million years ago and her "compatriot"

, for whom the upright gait is also well secured thanks to a reasonably complete skeleton, 4.4 million years ago.

The third and greatest sensation of the

skull, as it was also called, was the fact that various indicators such as certain features of the facial skull or the position of the hole at the base of the spine suggested that Sahelanthropus was already walking on two legs - at a time when the separation of our Tribal lineage from that of our closest surviving relatives, the chimpanzees, only a million years ago, if at all.

In the current issue of

A detailed analysis of three other primate bones has now been published, which were also found in the same place in July 2001 and in which everything indicates that, if they do not come from the exact individual of the skull, then they come from representatives of the same form Sahelanthropus.

It consists of fragments of two cubits (ulnae), namely one of a right forearm and one of a left one, as well as the shaft of a left thigh (femur).

So they are bones of the locomotion apparatus - climbing, for which you need forearms, is one of those - and should therefore finally provide more detailed information about whether Sahelanthropus could actually walk on two legs, or whether he rather climbed in trees and mainly all four on the ground use limbs

Because this point has been controversial since 2002.

But the debate was difficult to keep free of jealousies and rivalries between different scientists in the field of pre- and early-human research.

In a field about which it is only half-seriously said that there are more researchers than discoveries, this is hardly surprising.

In this case, however, a femur was found by another team in Kenya a year before the Sahelanthropus skull from Chad, which was also assigned to a previously unknown pre-human form called

.

And this was also confirmed by its discoverers to have a two-legged gait.

Orrorin is six million years old.