The idea of an ascendance for our species is quite recent (about 150 years ago). But questions remain: who was this ancestor, and where and when did he arise? In the 1980s, early hominids were known only from southern and eastern Africa. Digging in Djurab desert (Northern Chad) from 1994 onwards, the Mission Paléoanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne (MPFT) team unearthed first a new australopithecine (dated to 3.5 Ma, Brunet et al., 1995; Lebatard et al., 2008), the first ever found west of the Rift Valley and a later new hominid Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Brunet et al., 2002a) from the late Miocene, dated to 7 Ma (Vignaud et al., 2002; Lebatard et al., 2008). This earliest known hominid is a new milestone suggesting that an exclusively southern or eastern African origin of the hominid clade is likely to be incorrect. In the last decade our roots have descended deeper into the Lower Pliocene (4.4 Ma) to the Late Miocene (7 Ma) with three new species: Ardipithecus kadabba (5.8–5.2 Ma, Middle Awash, Ethiopia), Orrorin tugenensis (c. 6 Ma, Lukeino, Kenya) and the oldest one Sahelanthropus tchadensis (c. 7 Ma). S. tchadensis displays a unique combination of derived characters that clearly shows hominid affinities that are close, temporally speaking, to the last common ancestor between chimpanzees and humans, and that it cannot be related to chimpanzees or gorillas. In Chad, the Late Miocene sedimentological and palaeobiological data indicate the presence of a mosaic environment probably very similar to the present Okavango Delta (Central Kalahari, Bostwana). As with the other Late Miocene hominids, S. tchadensis was a bipedal animal living in a wooded habitat.

It is now clear that the earliest hominids did not inhabit savannah environments, nor were they living only in South and East Africa. In the light of this new evidence, our early hominid history must now be reconsidered within a completely new paradigm.