Orrorin is one of those prehistoric animals that you know next to nothing about except for general characteristics, either because it was very similar to another animal or because you didn’t get enough material (which is usually the case). Orrorin is one of those, with only a few teeth and bones found so far. However, what we have found tells us something very interesting.
Orrorin was definitely bipedal, and it had smaller teeth than the later austalopithecines, just like humans. It also was much older than most other hominins, around six mya. Orrorin tugenensis in the Tugen language of Kenya means ‘Original Man from The Tugen Hills.’ Orrorin is enigmatic because it has small, humanlike teeth even though actual human ancestors and relatives that came later had large, apelike teeth. So, there are two choices: One, everything scientists thought is wrong and what we thought are early Homo from 2 million years ago are actually not our ancestors and Orrorin’s descendants are still deep in the earth, waiting to be found. Two, the fact that Orrorin is 5 million years ahead of its time is just a coincidence and we should just let it be as a weird offshoot of our family.
Something else that complicates the whole story are tracks that look suspiciously human from the island of Crete in Greece from around the same time, even though no other evidence of hominins has been found at that time outside Africa. While there were other primates, they were not bipedal and probably not able to produce the kind of footprints from Crete. And with that, this is the end.
Anay Ganesh 