To date, due to the lack of adequate fossils, scientists have not agreed on exactly how and when walking began on two legs rather than the four that our ancestors used while living in trees.
One of the earliest known human ancestors, the Sahelanthropus tchadensis, whose fossils were discovered in Chad in the Sahel region of Africa, south of the Sahara, usually walked on two legs when on the ground, as early as about seven million years ago . This is the conclusion of the scientists who made a new careful anatomical analysis of the fossils of its upper and lower limbs.
The acquisition of bipedalism is considered a decisive step in human evolution. To date, due to the lack of adequate fossils, scientists have not agreed on exactly how and when walking began on two legs rather than the four that our ancestors used while living in trees. The new research reinforces the belief that the transition to bipedalism occurred fairly early in history.
The researchers from France, Chad and Ethiopia, led by Frank Guy of the French University of Poitiers and the French National Center for Science (CNRS), who made the relevant publication in the journal “Nature”, analyzed a femur and two forearm bones found in the Toros-Menala region of Chad’s Djurab Desert, where Sahelian Man was discovered in 2001.
Initial analysis of a nearly complete skull (which was “christened” Tumai meaning “the hope of life” in the local language) had yielded evidence of bipedalism. New study of limb fossils found in the same area (but impossible to confirm as Tumai) led to the definitive conclusion of bipedalism. At the same time, the anatomy of its bones shows that this ancient ancestor of ours had retained the ability to be quadrupedal and could quickly climb trees like an ape.
The scientists concluded that our early ancestors evolved the ability to walk on two legs early, shortly after the split between humans and chimpanzees that took different evolutionary paths (which happened 7 to 10 million years ago), but retained the anatomical ability to climb quickly into the trees. A few million years after Sahelian, another of our ancestors, Australopithecus, had already perfected bipedalism, always retaining the ability to quadruped in trees. Only with the appearance of the genus Homo did our ancestors permanently stop using their arms as legs and stand definitively and exclusively on their two legs.
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