From: Blunderov (squooker@mweb.co.za)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 07:31:37 MDT
[Blunderov]
This is from today's "Star" newspaper, Johannesburg.
<snip>
Sands of time reveal ancestor older than
any discovered before.
.................................... ..........................
By Steve Connor Independent Foreign service
London A skull from the earliest known member of the human family has
been unearthed In a remote desert in Central Africa in what has been
described as the most significant anthropological discovery for 75
years.
Scientists believe that the skull, thought to be between 6 million and 7
million years old, could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of human
origins and a radical rethink of the increasingly complex ancestry of
man.
The skull is about 3 million years older than the next oldest skull of a
hominid. Its discovery at a sand blown site in the middle of the Djurab
Desert of northern Chad has astonished scientists. They once thought
that the earliest humans were confined to a region stretching from
Southern Africa to the Great Rift valley, more than 1 600km to the east.
The journal Nature says it is the most important research paper in this
field since it published the discovery of
a 3 million year old apeman in 1925.
Nicknamed Tounial, which means hope of life" in the local Goran language
of Chad, the skull has a human like face with a braincase similar to
that of a chimpanzee. The creature was probably a male no bigger than a
small chimp. It lived mainly on fruit and may even have walked on two
legs.
It is Toumai man's age, however, that is most significant, falling in
the middle of a 5 million year "black hole between the points at which
the human family diverged from chimps some 10 million years ago to the
appearance of the many hominid fossils dating to less than 5 million
years old.
"I have been looking for this for so long. I knew I would one day find
It," said Professor Michel Brunet Of the University of Poitiers in
France.
"But there are lots of new questions," he said.
<snap>
Warm regards
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