"When I first saw the skull I thought: 'Gee, it's a chimp'," says anthropologist Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University. Toumaļ's brain, for example, was roughly chimp-sized. A closer look "blew my socks off", he recalls.Sahelanthropus has many traits that shout 'hominid'. These include smaller canines, and thicker tooth enamel than apes. And the point at the back of skull where neck muscles attach suggests that Toumaļ walked upright.
Many of Toumaļ's advanced features are missing from later fossils such as Australopithecus, but reappear in still later species that are classified as Homo.
I'd recommend this treatment over the AP report, which carries this confused and misleading description:
The skull appears to be the size of that of a modern common chimpanzee with a similar cranial capacity and smallish teeth. But facial details, such as a very thick bony eyebrow ridge, are like those of male hominids.
Male hominids have heavier brow ridges relative to female hominids, but hominids have less prominent brow ridges, and smaller teeth, relative to other apes. The Nature piece puts it more clearly: "Toumaï has other features that are just strange. 'It's got a massive brow ridge, the size of a large male gorilla, and yet it's just a little hominid,' says Lieberman. This heavy brow leads many to believe that Toumaļ was male." (UPDATE: Hmm, curiouser and curiouser - the Telegraph science writer has it thus: "It sported prominent brow ridges of a kind not seen outside our own genus, Homo." Another Nature Update article says the same. Learn something new everyday. So I'm confused on this brow-ridge thang. Any paleoanthropologist out there want to explain it? Since when do members of Homo have heavier brow ridges than other hominids and hominoids? Or are they just prominent in a nifty new sort of way?)
I do tend to roll my eyes at reports that invoke the "missing link", as does this USA Today version:
Since 1925, when the first humanlike fossil was discovered, known as the Taung skull, it has been widely believed that human evolution progressed in a straight line from a knuckle-walking primitive ape to a fully erect human.Ever since, paleontologists have been searching for a missing link to represent the bridge between apes and humans. Lucy, a 3.5-million-year-old fossil found in the 1970s, was one of the first candidates for that link. But many more fossils have been discovered since, with many combinations of features that show human evolution was not so simple.
As one of the scientists interviewed in the Nature article states, hominid evolution was conceived as a ladder - in 1963. But even in my schooldays of almost a quarter-century ago it was recognized that the Hominidae probably branched hither and yon and included "dead-end" extinct lineages. I'd like to ban the misleading term "missing link" from popular science writing. What is news, as the New Scientist version points out, is that
The blend of features in the new fossil further challenges the old theory that hominids evolved each key trait only once in a line of descent. "It's a great example of how the fossil record keeps showing how wrong our inferences are," said Susan Anton.Wood says it lends weight to the idea that hominid evolution is a series of diversifications, "in which anatomical features are 'mixed and matched' in ways that we are only beginning to comprehend."
Those of us who love the Three Stooges know that Curley (aka Curley Q. Link) was the Missing Link.
Posted by: Fred on July 11, 2002
I suppose most readers know by now that the "male hominid" had been identified by a respected French specialist in the field as a perfectly ordinary female gorilla. My wife thinks the original confusion was perfectly understandable. If the French specialist should turn out to be wrong, she's still betting that female gorilla and male anything are pretty hard to differentiate.
Posted by: Kenneth Burke on July 15, 2002