FRANCE: Scientists have drawn conclusions about when early humans became bipedals from a 17-million-year-old whale skull, according to Live Science. The whale lived in East Africa, where humanity is understood to have originated.
The time the ancient animal (Ziphiidae) existed is of importance to the scientists because it was also around this period when the East African plateau was much lower than today and covered by thick rainforests. Given the environment, human ancestors may have lived in trees, the scientists said.
But as hot materials called mantle plumes pushed the area up, it gradually became inaccessible to the moisture from the Indian Ocean. Because of this, the jungles turned into savannah.
Without the trees to cling to, the human ancestors learned to walk on two feet.
“It’s more or less the story about the bipedalism,” said Henry Wichura, a geoscience postdoctoral candidate at Germany’s University of Potsdam and one of the researchers.
According to the team of researchers, the whale fossil helped them determine that the uplift took place between 17 million and 13.5 million years ago.
The fossil was that of a seven-meter beaked whale, which lived in the ocean and was a deep diver. It, however, was found 740 kilometers away from what is today’s East African Coast and at an elevation of 640 meters.
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