When our root that lived out on open land began to depart from our tree-living cousin , bipedality became an unbelievable vantage . It is much more efficient to take the air upright alternatively of moving on all quadruplet . Recent analysis of a 6 - million - twelvemonth - old femoris has sacrifice clue about how this trait came about . The results were denote by lead author Sergio Almécija from Stony Brook University and were published inNature Communications .
The bone belongs to a member of the speciesOrrorin tugenensis . The specie lived roughly 6 million year ago at the end of the Miocene . There have only been about 20 fossil recover since its initial discovery in 2000 . The soubriquet “ Millennium Man ” has been given to the species , ground on the year of find .
Millennium Man ’s femur was subjected to cutting - boundary technology thatanalyzes the 3D morphology of the os . The information was compare to that of a variety of apes and other hominins , using over 400 individuals . The thighbone was deemed as receive an medium morphology between to the full bipedal prelate and those who were strictly arboreal and quadrupedal . There were also hit similarity to Australopithecus , the most illustrious of which is Lucy .
It is also dated to be average to quadrupedal ape and bipedal hominins . This new information convey about young hypotheses about how bipedality could have originated . Some mistrust that it could have help apes who walk upright on ramification .
Some scientists are n’t certain that Millennium Man was truly a hominin . If it is , it was potential one of the very first . Millennium Man does not have feature that are between current humans and current chimp , but instead between the earlier hominins of the Pliocene and ancestral anthropoid of the Miocene . This also opens the door to the idea that not all apes from the Miocene looked and moved just like New - day chimps , which should n’t be too surprising , given the fact that we do n’t see and move just like our ancestors .
Further report of other anthropoid from the Miocene will ask to occur to better empathize where and when bipedality uprise and how it came to be such an significant and advantageous trait .
