For one, until now almost all of the next earliest hominid fossils unearthed so far have come from East Africa, leading some scholars to posit that the origin of humans was essentially an "East Side story." Touma, however, comes from central Africa. And then theres his (the skull is thought to be that of a male) surprising combination of primitive and advanced features. Characteristics of the face and teeth clearly align Touma with hominids, say team leader Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France and his colleagues. But the braincase is comparable in size to that of a small ape. (Whether or not Touma and his kind were bipedal remains a matter of uncertainty. No skeletal elements have been found, but features on the base of the skull and the face resemble those of known bipedal hominids.)
As the oldest hominid on record, S. tchadensis could be the ancestor of all later hominidsincluding usaccording to Brunet and his collaborators, who announced their discovery today in the journal Nature. But that will be difficult to prove, cautions Bernard Wood of George Washington University in an accompanying commentary. "My prediction is that S. tchadensis is just the tip of an iceberg of taxonomic diversity during hominid evolution 5-7 million years ago," he writes. Whatever the case, it seems certain that this find will have a tremendous impact on the study of human origins. "Its a lot of emotion to have in my hand the beginning of the human lineage," Brunet muses. "I have been looking for this for so long."
