Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Toumaï)
- Date
- 2001 · confidence high
- Place
- Toros-Menalla, Djurab Desert, Borkou, Chad
- Credited to
- Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye, Franco-Chadian Palaeoanthropological Mission (Michel Brunet)
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
A skull about 7 million years old with features that could be hominin. It placed the origins of the human lineage close to the divergence with chimpanzees, and far from the eastern Rift.
Published in Nature (2002). Whether it was bipedal is debated; an associated femur has fuelled the debate.
What it led to
- a geographical broadening of the search for hominins
- a minimum date for the human-chimpanzee split
- debate over the earliest bipedalism