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Standing up for the earliest bipedal hominins

A leg bone and two arm bones of a hominin from Chad suggest that, seven million years ago, around the time that the human and chimpanzee lineages split, early hominins were bipedal but were also able to climb trees.
  1. Daniel E. Lieberman

    1. Daniel E. Lieberman is in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

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What set the human lineage on a separate path from chimpanzees sometime between ten million and six million years ago? The first scientists to study the origins of our species speculated that brain enlargement led the way in driving human evolution. However, nearly a century’s worth of fossil discoveries in Africa instead point to the ability to walk on two legs (bipedalism), and perhaps a slightly lower-quality diet compared with that of chimpanzees, as the first distinguishing features of the earliest hominins (species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees)1. Even so, much about the first hominins and why they evolved remains mysterious. Was the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees similar to a chimpanzee, a gibbon, a monkey or something completely different? And did bipedalism evolve before, during or after the split between humans and chimpanzees? Writing in Nature, Daver et al.2 present fossil evidence that helps to address some of these questions.

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Nature 609, 33-35 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02226-5

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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