The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago. Orrorin — discovered in Kenya in 2000 and nicknamed "Millennium Man" although its sex remains unknown — goes back 5.8 to 6.1 million years, while Sahelanthropus, found a year later in Chad, is considered by most experts to extend the human family tree another one million years into the past. Beyond that, however, fossils of early humans from the Miocene period, 23 to five million years ago, disappear. Fossils of early apes especially during the critical period of 14 to eight million years ago were virtually non-existant — until now. "We know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes," the authors of the paper noted. But the new fossils, dubbed "Chororapithecus abyssinicus" by the team of Japanese and Ethiopian paleoanthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split occurred before that.
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The scientists leading the team that found the fossils — Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo, and Ethiopian paleontologists Berhane Asfaw and Yonas Beyene — calculated that the human-orangutan split "could easily have been as old as 20 million years."
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Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio... described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.
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"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told AFP.