17-Million-Year-Old Whale Fossil Gives Clues to Humanity's Birthplace

More than the discovery of the fact that a fossil of a beaked whale is 17 million years old is the realization that the said artifact can help scientists "solve a puzzle about the likely birthplace of humanity in East Africa," according to Mashable.

According to a study, the said whale lived when the East African plateau was still considerably lower and had dense forests. As such, the fossil gives clues to when the uplift in the plateau happened, after which the dried-out region turned into a savannah, leading tree-living ancestors of humanity to start walking upright.

"It's more or less the story about the bipedalism," said Henry Wichura, one of the study's researchers and geoscience postdoctoral candidate and Germany's University of Potsdam.

Previously, researchers are unable to pinpoint a more specific period when the uplift began. However, with the fossil's discovery, scientists are learning when exactly the shift began, which researchers now estimate to happen "sometime between 17 million and 13.5 million years ago."

"The whale is telling us all kinds of things," Louis L. Jacobs, the study's co-author, was quoted by University Herald as saying. "It tells us the starting point for all that uplift that changed the climate that led to humans. It's amazing."

"The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle," Jacobs explained. "As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands. Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that's when - in human evolution - the primates started to walk upright."

The whale fossil was actually discovered decades ago but was only recently studied closely.

"The beaked whale fossil was discovered in 1964 by J.G. Mead in what is now the Turkana region of northwest Kenya," Science Daily noted. "Over the years, the Kenya whale fossil went missing in storage."

"Jacobs, who was at one time head of the Division of Paleontology for the National Museums of Kenya, spent 30 years trying to locate the fossil," the science news site continued. "His effort paid off in 2011, when he rediscovered it a Harvard University and returned it to the National Museums of Kenya."

"You don't usually find whales so far inland," Jacobs clarified. "Many of the known beaked whale fossils are dredged by fishermen from the bottom of the sea."

The whale's species, classified as a Turkana ziphiid, is considered one of the ocean's top predators and is one of the "deepest diving air-breathing mammals alive."