Facelift seals standing of oldest hominid

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The new teeth samples verify that Toumaï had small canines, alongside large molars and premolars that had thick enamel. Such a pattern is similar to that of later members of the human family. The virtual reconstruction, led by Brunet's colleague Christoph Zollikofer at the University of Zürich-Irchel in Switzerland, uses a high-resolution computed tomography, or CT, scan to show what the fossil would look like without its cracks and other distortions. The reconstruction shows that the opening in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes, called the foramen magnum, is oriented so that the neck points downwards. But in apes, such as gorillas, the neck point backwards, explains Dan Lieberman, a palaeoanthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of Brunet's team. This means that Toumaï's head balanced on top of its spine, suggesting an upright walking stance. "The evidence certainly suggests that Toumaï was a biped," says Lieberman... [who] ...points out that all of the earliest known bipeds, such as the hominid Australopithecus afarensis, which is about half as old as Toumaï, had large neck muscles. "This work confirms that Toumaï is the earliest and most complete hominid, and suggests that the earliest hominids were bipedal," claims Lieberman. "And that's big news."