Scientists from Case Western Reserve University, Kent State University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History were part of an international team that discovered a skeleton that they believe dates back 3.6 million years. They named it Kadanuumuu, meaning big man. It's estimated to be about 400 thousand years older than Lucy and it sheds some light on how early hominids got around. Until now, the scientific community thought Lucy climbed trees and walked mainly on all fours. But, an evaluation of Kadanuumuu's nearly intact shoulder blade leads scientists to believe hominids likely walked upright. Yohannes Haile-Selassie is curator of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Haile-Selassie: Every part of its skeletal elements that we were able to recover indicate it was fully bipedal like ourselves and it had more advanced human like upright gate.
If that theory holds true, that means hominids were walking upright 3.6 million years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Their findings are published in today's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.