The first hominid was found in 2002, according to Professor Tim White of the Univ. of California at Berkeley.
It must have been a repeat, but on John McLaughlin's "One on One" this Saturday the topic was about the finding of an early human-like skull and jaw from a site in Africa that is estimated to be about seven million years old. I had never heard of the story though, and I like reading science rags, so I thought I would share.
John McLaughlin: Do you share that view, Professor White, namely that this skull is a common ancestor of the chimpanzee and the hominid, and that it is critical because it occurred seven million years ago?
Professor Tim White: Well... This is from a period that we haven’t been able to sample prior to this discovery. It’s a period that was effectively a black hole. And what this team of Michel Brunet and colleagues has done is to go in and find the first real evidence of human evolution in this period. Many of us have been looking in rocks of this age all over Africa, and Michel has found the place that yielded the only one that’s there. And it’s kind of an ambassador, or a messenger from the past. And Brunet’s interpretation of it is that it represents the first step in evolution on our side of the family tree after we split from chimpanzees. So that, this is not the common ancestor, this is actually the first hominid.
Here is a link to the Wiki on this fossil, which is called Sahelanthropus tchadensis, and nicknamed, Toumaï.
And as an aside, I just think that John McLaughlin generally blows the doors off Charlie Rose. Charlie is good, but McLaughlin gets right to things, and he doesn’t have many (if any, I can’t remember one) fluffy celebrity drivel.