At the very beginning of this century, a sensational finding in Chad was announced, claiming that the fossil 7 million years old hominin (Sahelanthropus) found by a French expedition may be the first habitually bipedal pre-human (hominin). Despite some doubts, this claim has been accepted by most paleoanthropologists for 22 years. It seemed to be confirmed by a recent study of the being’s femur. However, a follow-up study of the bone recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution refutes this opinion — Cazenave et al. 2024: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248424000654?via%3Dihub.
According to the authors of this new study, the external and internal structure of the Sahelanthropus femur do not support evidence of habitual bipedalism for this African hominid. According to the paper’s conclusions and theories, Sahelanthropus may be an evolutionary side branch close to that of humans (Hominini) but parallel to it.
The authors of the study include Prof Nikolai Spassov from the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. His opinion on the similarity of some features of the Sahelanthropus femur to those of non-hominid primates and even to some carnivores is cited in the press release of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, which is the workplace of the first author of the paper “Postcranial evidence does not support habitual bipedalism in Sahelanthropus tchadensis: A reply to Daver et al. (2022).” mpg.de/22183908/what-about-bipedalism-in-sahelanthropus