Toros-Menalla in brief
Toros-Menalla is a fossil site in the Djurab Desert, in the north of Chad. The desert is far from the East African rift valley, where most early human fossils have been found, and it lies well west of it, close to the southern edge of the Sahara. The fossil animals found in the same layers suggest that the site lay close to a lake, with woodland and savannah around it and a sandy desert not far away.
Discovery
On 19 July 2001 a Chadian student on a field team, Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye, spotted a skull lying on the surface of the sand at Toros-Menalla. The team, a joint Chadian and French mission led by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers, found five jaw pieces and teeth nearby. The skull was badly crushed from top to bottom but was mostly complete. It is catalogued as TM 266-01-060-1 and nicknamed Toumai, a word in the local Daza language that means “hope of life”.
Brunet’s team described the find in Nature in 2002 and named it Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The same issue of the journal carried a second paper by Vignaud and colleagues on the geology and fossil animals of the site.
Dating
The sediments at Toros-Menalla contain no volcanic ash layers, so the usual radiometric dating methods could not be used directly. The first age came from comparing the fossil animals in the same layers with those from known East African sites, which suggested 6 to 7 million years. A later study that dated the sediments with cosmogenic isotopes gave an age of 6.8 to 7.2 million years.
What was found
Apart from the skull and jaw pieces, the site has produced a range of fossil animals from the same layers. Researchers have used them to reconstruct the environment, which was wetter and more wooded than the desert is today. Later work has reported a femur and two forearm bones from the wider Toros-Menalla area. A 2022 Nature paper by Daver and colleagues said they show upright walking. A 2025 reply disputed that, and a 2026 study by Williams and colleagues argued that the limb bones show hominin-like proportions. That debate is covered on the Toumai page and the species page.
Visiting
Toros-Menalla is a remote site in the desert, far from any tourist routes, and it is not open to visitors. The skull is kept in Chad and is studied by researchers; it is not a regular public display at the site.
Why Toros-Menalla matters
Toros-Menalla is about 2,500 km from the East African Rift Valley, so it extended the map of early human relatives far beyond the rift. If Sahelanthropus is a human relative, it shows that our lineage was spread across Africa by about 7 million years ago, not confined to one valley. Because the evidence rests on a single skull and a few other pieces, the site is one of the most debated in palaeoanthropology.
Sources
- Brunet, M. and others (2002). A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa. Nature 418: 145 to 151.
- Vignaud, P. and others (2002). Geology and palaeontology of the Upper Miocene Toros-Menalla hominid locality, Chad. Nature 418: 152 to 155.
- Daver, G. and others (2022). Postcranial evidence of late Miocene hominin bipedalism in Chad. Nature 609: 94 to 100.
- Cazenave, M. and others (2025). Postcranial evidence does not support habitual bipedalism in Sahelanthropus tchadensis: a reply to Daver et al. (2022). Journal of Human Evolution 103557.
- Williams, S. A. and others (2026). Earliest evidence of hominin bipedalism in Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Science Advances.
- Lebatard, A.-E. and others (2008). Cosmogenic nuclide dating of Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Australopithecus bahrelghazali: Mio-Pliocene hominids from Chad. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 3226 to 3231.
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program. Sahelanthropus tchadensis.