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Toros-Menalla (Toumaï)

A fossil site in Chad's Djurab desert where a French-Chadian team found a crushed but largely complete skull nicknamed 'Toumaï' in 2001-2002, dated to roughly 7 million years old and formally named Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Its describers argue skeletal features show early bipedalism, making it potentially the oldest known hominin - but a significant minority of palaeoanthropologists argue the evidence is equally consistent with an extinct ape, and its place on the human family tree remains genuinely unresolved.

Dated events and their evidence

• about 7,000,000 years ago disputed
  OUT OF NORMAL RANGE (~7 million years ago): age of the Sahelanthropus fossils source
• 2001 CE mainstream
  fossils discovered by the Mission Paléoanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne source

Where

16.2500° N, 17.5000° E

Sources

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12758524/
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/sahelanthropus-tchadensis-ten-years-after-the-disocvery-2449553/

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