The regime. Chimpanzees our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. But when did our ancestors and their start going their separate ways. And where did our human lineage 1st originate. Until now africa the home of todays chimpanzees has always been considered the cradle of humanity. A team of scientists have now called that theory into question it wouldnt be surprising to see animals in europe that may have been at. German researcher madeleine banana has tracked down a missing fossilized job own. On creature researchers discovered the fossilized footprints of a mysterious by pat. Robertson on the incomes presumably a Little Family group of these home inns and in germany a new extinct great ape came to light into the team we have only this isnt a genuine transition to a missing legacy. Was europe not africa the actual cradle of humanity. Athens capital of greece and ancient birthplace of democracy. For years now the german paleontologist Madeleine Buena has been researching the Natural History of this region. What she discovered could radically change our understanding of Human Evolution. In the saudi doesnt it great climate today is mediterranean hot dry summers and cool when winters for the 7000000 years ago things were very different because of landscape covered today by athens used to be grass much less savannah and in us. And the animals that lived here at that time were different. To greece was home to several species of elephants. There were also rhinos. Giraffes. And ostriches animals that today live in africa if i am it was 4 or 5 degrees warmer than now and whether to a lost or he was ill just. At that time 7000000 years ago a mysterious creature lived in southeastern europe. Only a few traces of it remain. It may have been our very earliest ancestor. The search for traces of this creature brought madeleine burma to investigate a story that began in athens in 1944. The city had been occupied by the german families for 3 years the situation was tense and resistance by greek partisans against the occupiers was becoming fiercer by the day. The German Occupation forces included geologist bruno phone 5. It was his job to supervise the construction of new bunkers and artillery positions. On the grounds of a farm on the outskirts of athens his workers discovered something unusual in the rubble. Zeros he could have. Firmly embedded inside iraq was a piece of ancient bone. It was just one of many fossils that now come to light. Some more astonishingly well preserved. One of them 5 oclock. Back knew enough about failing intelligence to realize that this was an extraordinary. Ordinary finds he told his workers to retrieve as many of the bones as they could be and to preserve them for science for the Business Office issued in 1949 fun fiber describe the fossils in a scientific paper and listed an ape jaw among the finds. Doesnt wolf inside the paper fit in the germans it was only 5 pages long as the fan was published in greece who causes lead to not much attention was paid to it and people thought it was an ordinary a bottle effect. Only decades later in 1972 did researchers reexamine the jaw and realize that bruno phone 5 had discovered the remains of an extinct ape a greco pivot because for the scientists this was a crucial difference because apes are our closest animal relatives in our shared evolutionary history around 14000000 years ago the branch of the a ring a tans formed. Today they live in southeast asia. Then some 10000000 years ago the evolutionary line of the gorillas formed. They are only found in africa. 7 to 8000000 years ago the chimpanzees embarked on their own evolutionary path. They are our closest animal relatives. The human chimpanzees split marks the beginning of our own Evolutionary Development but where would the greco pittacus job own be placed on this timeline bruno phone fibered had not determined its age and the job own had meanwhile been misplaced. Then in 2009 at an excavation site in bulgaria researchers found a single tooth it too came from an extinct great ape scientists were able to date the premolar and realized it was a sensational find. The tooth was more than 7000000 years old and dated from the crucial phase when humans and chimpanzees parted company and our own evolution began. This isnt that moment i suddenly remembered from try that and thought there might be a connection in terms of age and also no cation between the 2 thrum bull garia and the john bone from greece does indeed that realisation was what really got me interested in the topic of Human Evolution shifting. Could our roots actually lie in europe if madelyn burmas interpretation proves correct all rounder standing of Human Evolution would be overturned only. Because chimpanzees are native to africa today and not only looks but behaves so much like us researchers suspected as early as the 19th century that humankind had originated in africa. This is something that has survived to the present day and has rarely been called into question. And Something Else has supported the assumption that africa is the cradle of humanity. Many important fossils of our early human ancestors have been discovered there since the 1920 s. The Scientific Consensus has long been that modern humans arose in africa. The idea that our roots might extend even further back and perhaps outside africa would shake up our understanding of Human Evolution. At the university of missouri in the u. S. The anatomist carol ward is working on reconstructing the evolutionary history of some of the most important fossil finds from africa. Among them is probably the most famous african fossil lucy a presuming of the species australopithecus after insists. 40 percent of the skeleton has been preserved. Lucy is sort of the poster child for Human Evolution because shes so complete and when she was found in the 70s she was not only the most complete skeleton she at that time was earliest in our timeline of Human Evolution. Lucy was discovered in 1974 during an excavation by the american paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson in the ethiopian a far region the research crew was listening to the beatles song lucy in the sky with diamonds at the camp that night and johansen thought the skeleton was likely female so they decided to name her lucy lucy lived 3000000 years ago so this is really about halfway through time since we branched off from a chimpanzee lineage from an ancestor that was like a champ was like a human that lived 6 or 8000000 years ago. Using forensic techniques researchers were able to reconstruct lucy and give her a face. And she was only one metre tall and weighed 29. 00 kilos. Unlike a great ape lucy was able to walk upright. But lucy lou. Long after the time when humans and chimpanzees diverged 7000000 years ago. And its difficult to place lucy within the human family tree during that phase Human Evolution was already fairly advanced. And lucy lived at a pivotal time a time when many prehuman species lived in africa side by side. She may not have been ancestral to you and me she was a member of one of several species of australia paths whether which one of those was our ancestor if any we dont really know but theyre all similar in many ways and its certain that our ancestor was Something Like them and share the features that most of them have in common. To understand the origins of modern humans we must go even further back in time to lucy to get even closer to the time when humans and chimpanzees went their separate evolutionary ways this is why another and much older fossil from africa has become an object of attention to my. To my or somehow lender president s it was unearthed in chad in 2001. To my was found in the sahara a great distance away from the east african sites where lucy was found over millions of years the to my skull had become distorted. As a result the fossilized skull had to be reconstructed virtually using a complex imaging process the goal was to determine whether to my was an extinct ape or an early human ancestor. The analysis showed that to my head a mix of features his thick brow ridges resemble those of a male go. Or chimpanzee but below his face was slightly flatter. For many scientists the most important anatomical detail was at the base of the skull. We know that one of the earliest features that sets us apart from our forbearers is standing upright on 2 feet one thing we have is the hole where the spinal cord leaves the skull and in humans this is up tucked up underneath the skull like we see right here and saw how anthropos this is the hole is called frame and magnum which means big hole and its right here underneath the skull so i put it up here we can tell that the frontier broke column would have been underneath the head. In a chimpanzee or a monkey or some other animal that frame in magnum would be back here because its quadrupedal. To my cannot be dated with absolute precision but is estimated to have lived between 6 and 7000000 years ago. To somehow land surface date from the very earliest stage of Human Evolution or could the fossils on earth and europe be even older. It was an intriguing question but one that had no answer yet the tooth from bulgaria was an interesting find but not a definitive one and the job own discovered in athens in 1904 had not been dated with precision. The job o. Needed to be examined using modern methods but it could no longer be found. Madelyne burma spent 2 years looking for it with no success. Finally someone suggested that she speak with one of bruno phone fiberglass former colleagues who had retired almost 20 years earlier. This was the breakthrough. Of the visible vibration when our collections were being constantly dismantled at the institute to make room for laborious. Professor phone freiburg said to me. This is the most valuable piece in our collection and so someone to treat it with can see a lot of the sick of this so the secretary and i put it in a safe at the Institute Just to do it even if i opted. That was in the 1980 s. I was stunned hes when i said oh you mean the ape his thats in the safe back here and say fat was an unbelievable moment to. My mother and. Father joes if that then is safe was opened on all sides and out came a plastic a food containers with a label on it. And theres a red marker for the word import is just great hope if it is for a bag. Or a coupe you take was fired back in on top of those receiving end up with nasty crude containers and he says it was a which was actually a good way to store it. That was a bit bizarre he just said in the business insist. In 2014 the greco pittacus job own was brought to the university of tubing it where it was examined using modern methods. The fossil was fragile and had been damaged during the war its earlier researchers had only been able to examine its x. Journal anatomy. But now the scientists could examine the interior of the fossil without destroying it. Using computer tomography they visualize the internal structure of the job own. Family untie the all spoke to sons for here we have a 3 d. Printout of the crick up at the case to the shit we saw on the computer fast you can see very clearly that there are nuts or fused almost to the. Gusts that is very typical of human dental roots and all its going to cause a chimpanzee to theodosius that same tooth he lower jaw premolar we have a wide again you have a ship that appears exactly the same 2 time a human eye and we only see one root or an injury could hit the cacique the roots are in the process of fuse equals out of the city of watson of to vegas into c. So its made their question is it or instead they also converge and come together heres was and this is characteristic of a human india aforementioned. What might seem like a minor detail was for the scientists an indication that greco pittacus might have been an early prehuman. But his greco pic is older than all the african prehuman fossils discovered to date. The former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in nuremberg 75 years after the end of the 2nd world war its now part of a museum and documentation center. This is where madeleine burmah made the discovery that helped her date the job own. The other fossils that bruno phone fiber collected in athens in 1944 were being held in storage in the catacombs of the congress hall. They had been handed over to the nuremberg Natural History society which kept them here. For madelyne burma the discovery marked another turning point. Not as a tiny hunch but hes really did label these by hand we can see that on to this one you know when you realize by importance of this collection was and i knew it had to exist but i had no idea that. There would be so many fossils of such high quality without this collection we wouldnt have been able to reconstruct the environment or date the jawbone as precisely so this is an absolute treasure the job done on its own is an important find but without the same source the context in time and space would have been a surprise and all. A very unusual fossil offered the key to unlocking the age of the job own up. Beside it at its height the age can be determined by examining the rock in the settling is not as if the problem with our fossils from a careless of us releases in the grease on that is that we had a drawer full of bones but no sediment simply comes out fortunately we had some giraffe doesnt have any this bone allowed us to do the data on the board see heres a hole if we look inside we can see that its happening all of the reddish 70 and to have been the other half is a cavity and a few see the sediment was liquid when it was loaded to the bone and settled on the bottom what the cavity and. Also this was up to set up and this was down and that information helped us to date thats nonsense you. The scientists determine the orientation of tiny magnetic particles inside the fossil those particles would have aligned themselves to the earths Magnetic Field at the time when the sediment was deposited in the bone and the sample became fossilized over millions of years the earths magnetic poles have reversed at irregular intervals Magnetic North became magnetic south and then flipped back again but the orientation of the particles remained fixed inside the sample. Scientists know when these poll reversals took place by comparing the magnetic fingerprint of the sample to this chronology scientists can arrive at a date for the sample this dating helped the researchers determine that the giraffe bone and the job bone are 7175000 years old. Madelaine burma had made a surprising discovery. Her research was published in 2017. And made headlines around the world. Believe that her discovery suggested the 1st hamann in line the oldest human ancestors could have emerged in europe and not in africa. The tooth and job own supported her hypothesis but offered no conclusive proof. Then another piece of evidence surfaced on crete. On the northwest coast of the island near track in los that with an International Research team in 2002 a polish paleontologist discovered some unusual fossilized footprints here some breaking they bore traces of bipedalism of an animal that walked upright on 2 legs a crucial feature distinguishing our early ancestors from great apes and they were around 6000000 years old older than almost all the fossils in africa so this appeal. Is the outline of the whole print. There you go thats the bull. The big toe. On the smaller side toes. Its the whole thing. The shape of the foot and the forward pointing toes are reminiscent of human footprints. It seems unlikely that they were made by an animal that stood only briefly on its hind legs which presumably would have left behind call marks and other revealing traces. These footprints as far as we can tell. Our footprints of homing ins in other words early members of our own lineage and they all the earliest homing in footprints known anywhere in the world by a considerable margin maybe at least 3000000 years so. I love them because they are a record of life think about i mean you know if you found like you know the skeleton of an early hominid that would of course be killed but its the skeleton of a dead homing and what we have here is its like a sort of static film clip in stone of a family of live hominids not only see the case that the surfaces that you see reflected in the stone is the actual living flesh or the foot right. But you seeing behavior. A similar trail of footprints was discovered in lie a totally tanzania in 1978 the footprints were most likely left by an early species of human possibly even a relative of lucy. But the footprints are only 3600000 years old much younger than those of the mysterious footprints on crete. The animals that made these footprints lived at a much earlier evolutionary period as proven by the dating of the sandstone in which their tracks are preserved. The collection of footprints allowed the researchers to draw some additional conclusions. To get a shoreline here maybe select maybe a little river delta were not quite sure but we very close to the waters edge and along comes presumably a Little Family group of these common and looking for this and what were they the kind of like little hairy humans or little chimpanzees that somebody is taught to walk on the back legs the tallest ones might be about a metre 40 in height or so but the youngsters perhaps half that and what are they doing with this seems to be just wandering around at a guess theyre probably foraging for food at the waters edge the footprints on the surface so to me and around the snow very clear path and its not like theyre purposefully walking in some direction do they actually look like theyre having a nice day on the beach. The researchers now plan to date the sandstone with even greater precision. They suspect. The footprints might be older than 6000000 years. This state could offer further evidence for determining when bipedalism evolved. A trait that is only found in humans and their ancestors. But if not enough thats why the question of bipedalism is key to differentiating between early chimpanzees and prehuman must form and the only way to answer it 100 percent is from footprints on the change coming and club alone does offer evidence of whether it might have come from a bipedal binding but the footprint is what offers the ultimate proof just device. But what might have sparked the evolution of early humans in eu