Human ancestor gets leg up on walking
By Bruce Bower
One of the earliest known hominids, a 6-million-year-old member of humanity’s evolutionary family, walked upright with nearly the same facility as do people today, according to a new fossil analysis.
In 2001, a French team recovered teeth and limb-bone fragments of Orrorin tugenensis in Kenya. A disagreement quickly arose about whether the fossil teeth more closely resembled those of even-older apes or of later hominids (SN: 7/14/01, p. 20: Earliest Ancestor Emerges in Africa). Anthropologists leaning toward the hominid interpretation argue that the upper-leg bones from O. tugenensis support a two-legged gait, a prime characteristic of hominids.