Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years

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PARIS, Aug 21 (AFP): Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday.
The handful of teeth from the earliest direct ancestors of modern gorillas ever found-one canine and eight molars-also leave virtually no doubt, the study's authors and experts said, that both humans and modern apes did indeed originate from Africa.
The near total absence to date of traces on the continent of apes from this period had led many scientists to conclude that the shared line from which humans and living great apes emerged had taken a long evolutionary detour through Eurasia.
The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes-including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees-several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.
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.