blivet radio: Archaeology
blivet radio archaeology

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

More on Sahelanthropus tchadensis Meet the Oldest Member of the Human Family [Scientific American] OK, a little bit more. 11:52:13 PM    comment   trackback []

Oldest hominid skull shakes human family tree "The wind-blown Djurab Desert of Chad has opened a new window on early human evolution - a hominid skull six to seven million years old, at least two million years older than any skull previously discovered. The stunning find was unearthed by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France and his team. "It's a lot of emotion to have in my hand the beginning of the human lineage. I've been looking for 25 years." Named Sahelanthropus, the new species is close to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. It and other recent discoveries "strongly shake our conceptions of the earliest steps of hominid history," Brunet says. "The divergence between chimp and human must be even older than we thought." Sahelanthropus shows the last common ancestor "did not closely resemble any modern ape," said Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley. Although its body and brain were the size of a modern chimp's, its face was quite different, with large brow ridges and much smaller canine teeth. From the back, the skull "looks like a chimpanzee, whereas from the front it could pass for a 1.75 million year old advanced australopithicine" says Bernard Wood of the George Washington University. Such a mosaic of features is also evident in a newly discovered 1.8 million year old skull from Georgia." [New Scientist] This really does blow everything open. Things have gotten very interesting. 7:15:52 PM    comment   trackback []