Sahelanthropus
Extinct hominid from Miocene Africa / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sahelanthropus tchadensis "Toumaï" | |
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Cast of the skull of Toumaï | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Mammalia |
Order: | Primates |
Suborder: | Haplorhini |
Infraorder: | Simiiformes |
Family: | Hominidae |
Genus: | †Sahelanthropus Brunet et al., 2002[1] |
Species: | †S. tchadensis |
Binomial name | |
†Sahelanthropus tchadensis Brunet et al., 2002[1] | |
Sahelanthropus tchadensis is an extinct species of the hominid dated to about 7 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. The species, and its genus Sahelanthropus, was announced in 2002, based mainly on a partial cranium, nicknamed Toumaï, discovered in northern Chad.
Sahelanthropus tchadensis lived close to the time of the chimpanzee–human divergence, and was possibly related to Orrorin, a species of Homininae that lived about one million years later. It may have been ancestral to both humans and chimpanzees (which would place it in the tribe Hominini), or alternatively an early member of the tribe Gorillini. Studies in the 2020s analyzed the femur and ulna, and their results suggested that Sahelanthropus was not habitually bipedal, casting some doubt on its position as a human ancestor.[2][3]