They dined not only on fruits and leaves, as modern chimpanzees do, but may also have already become meat eaters.
The size of the lower jaw and some bones of the skeleton suggests that one of these individuals was about the size of a modern chimpanzee.
Our ancestors split from the evolutionary lineage that evolved into modern chimpanzees about five million years ago.
To begin with, why did the lineage that contained the common ancestors of both modern chimpanzees and humans split five million years ago?
Its brain size was very similar to that of modern chimpanzees and gorillas.
That mixture, combined with his great age, probably places Toumai closer than any other known fossil to the last common ancestor shared by modern chimpanzees and modern humans.
However, the brain/body ratio hi the early hominid was perhaps twice that of a modern chimpanzee, and four times that of a modern gorilla.
Nevertheless, it is in some ways unlike chimpanzees, suggesting that the common ancestor differs from the modern chimpanzee.
Who was also, we hasten to point out, a modern chimpanzee's manlike ancestor.
By 3.7 million years ago, these increasingly humanlike creatures walked on two legs but still had small skulls and brains similar to those of modern chimpanzees.
