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- [Narrator] Chimpanzees our closest relatives

in the animal kingdom,

but when did our and their ancestors

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start going their separate ways,

and where did our human lineage first originate?

Until now Africa, the home of today's chimpanzees,

has always been considered the cradle of humanity.

That view is now being called into question.

- It wouldn't be surprising to see animals in Europe

that may have been ancestral.

- [Narrator] German researcher, Madelaine Bohme,

discovers a puzzling jaw bone in Greece.

On Crete, researchers find the fossilized footprints

of a mysterious biped.

(upbeat music)

- And along comes presumably a little family group

or eminence.

- And in Germany, a new extinct great Ape comes to light.

- We think this is a genuine transition,

a missing link.

- [Narrator] Was Europe, not Africa,

the actual cradle of humanity?

Athens capital of Greece,

and ancient birthplace of democracy.

For years now, the German Paleontologist Madelaine Bohme

has been researching the natural history of this region.

What she discovered during that time could radically change

our view of human evolution.

- The Greek climate today is Mediterranean,

hot, dry summers, and cool wet winters.

seven million years ago things were very different.

The landscape covered today by Athens

used to be grassland, a Savannah.

- [Narrator] And to the animal kingdom at that time

was entirely different too,

Greece was home to several species of elephant.

There were also rhinos, giraffes and ostriches.

Animals we know today from Africa.

- It was four or five degrees warmer than now,

and wetter to, a lost world.

- [Narrator] At that time, seven million years ago,

a mysterious creature was living in Southeastern Europe.

Only a few traces of it still survive.

It may have been our very earliest ancestor.

(plane engine roaring)

The search for clues begins in Athens in 1944,

the city has been occupied

by the German Wehrmacht for three years.

The situation is tense and resistance by Greek partisans

against the occupiers is becoming fiercer by the day.

Among the Germans is the geologist Bruno Von Freyberg.

His task is to supervise construction work

on new bunkers and gun positions,

on the grounds of a farm on the outskirts of Athens,

his workers discover something unusual in the rubble.

(speaks in foreign language)

Inside a block firmly bonded to the rock,

a piece of ancient bone.

(speaks in foreign language)

It's just one of many fossils that now come to light.

Some are astonishingly well preserved.

(upbeat music)

- The paleontologists Bruno Freyberg knew right away

that this was an extraordinary find.

He told his workers to retrieve as many of the bones

as they could to preserve them the science.

- [Narrator] In 1949, Von Freyberg

describes the fossils in a scientific paper,

and he also lists a monkey jaw among the finds.

- The papers in German was only five pages long

and was published in Greece,

but not much attention was paid to it.

people thought it was an ordinary monkey jaw.

- [Narrator] Only decades later in 1972.

Does it become clear that Von Freyberg

actually discovered the remains of an extinct great Ape.

For researchers, this difference is crucial

because in the animal kingdom,

the great apes are our closest relatives.

In our shared evolutionary history,

around 14 million years ago,

the branch of the orangutans formed,

today they live in Southeast Asia.

Then some 10 million years ago,

the evolutionary line of the gorillas formed.

They are only found in Africa.

It was 7 to 8 million years ago that finally the chimpanzees

embarked on their own evolutionary path.

They are our closest animal relatives.

The human chimpanzee split finally marks the beginning

of our own evolutionary development.

But where can the Jawbone of Grecopithecus

be placed on this timeline?

Von Freyberg had not determined its age,

and the Jawbone had also disappeared.

Then in 2009, at an excavation site in Bulgaria

researchers find a single molar.

It too comes from an extinct great ape.

It's a sensational find because scientists

can date the tooth

It's over 7 million years old and comes precisely

from that crucial phase when man

and chimpanzee parted company,

and our own evolution began.

- At that moment, I suddenly remembered Bruno Von Freyburg

and thought three might be a connection

in terms of age and also locality

between the two from Bulgaria and the jaw bone from Greece.

Actually, that was what really got me interested

in the topic of human evolution.

- [Narrator] Could our roots really lie in Europe.

If Madelaine Bohme's suspicions are confirmed,

it would amount to a scientific earthquake.

Since chimpanzees live in Africa today.

And it not only look but behave so much like us.

Researcher suspected as early as the 19th century,

that humanity had also originated in Africa.

This assumption has survived to the present day

and it's hardly ever been called into question.

And something else has also made us assume,

until now at least that Africa is the cradle of humanity.

Numerous important fossils of our early human ancestors

have been discovered there since the 1920s.

Most experts are quite certain that humanity

can only have originated in Africa and nowhere else.

So the idea that our roots extended even further back

and even outside Africa

has gone against the general consensus so far.

At the university of Missouri in the U.S

the Anatomist Carol Ward is working on reconstructing

the evolutionary history of some

of the most famous finds from Africa.

Among them is probably

the most well-known African fossil Lucy.

a prehuman of the species Australopithecus afarensis.

40% of the skeleton has been preserved.

- Lucy is sort of the poster child for human evolution

because she's so complete.

And when she was found in the seventies,

she was not only the most complete skeleton.

She at that time was earliest in our timeline

of human evolution.

- [Narrator] Lucy was discovered in 1974

during an excavation

by the American paleo anthropologists Donald Johanson

in the Ethiopian afar region.

The Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

was being played in the researcher's camp

hence the name, also because the remains were most likely

those of a female.

- Lucy, lived 3 million years ago.

So she's really about halfway through time.

Since we branched off from a chimpanzee lineage,

from an ancestor that wasn't like a Chimp,

wasn't like the human that lived six or 8 million years ago.

- [Narrator] Using forensic methods.

It was even possible to completely reconstruct Lucy

and give her a face.

She was only one meter tall and weighed 29 kilograms.

Unlike a great ape,

Lucy could already walk well on two legs.

However, she clearly arrived long after the divergence

of the human and chimpanzee lineages

around seven million years ago.

It's also difficult to place Lucy with any precision

in the human lineage because during that phase,

our early history of development was already well-advanced.

Africa is like one huge experimental laboratory

of human evolution.

Many species of prehuman lived side by side.

- She may not have been ancestral to you and me.

She was a member of one of several species of australopiths,

whether which one of those was our ancestor, if any,

we don't really know.

But they're all similar in many ways.

And it's certain that our ancestor was something like them

and shared the features that most of them have in common.

- [Narrator] This uncertainty also makes one thing clear,

to understand the origin of humankind

we have to look even further back and to come as close

as possible to the human chimpanzee split.

And this is why another older find from Africa

is now the object of very special attention.

Tumai Sahelathropus tchadensis

to give his scientific name is discovered

in Chad in 2001.

The locality is the Sahara, far away

from the known sites in East Africa,

where Lucy was also found.

Over millions of years,

the fossil has become greatly distorted.

So it has to be straightened out in a complex process

on the computer to determine whether the fossil comes

from an extinct great ape or an early human ancestor.

(upbeat music)

It becomes clear that Tumai has a mixture of features,

his thick Simeon brown ridges

resemble those of a male gorilla or chimpanzee,

but underneath the face is slightly flatter.

However, for many researchers,

the most important anatomical detail lies below the skull.

- We know that one of the earliest features

that sets us ape for forebears

is standing upright on two feet.

One thing we have is the hole

where the spinal cord leaves the skull,

and in humans this is up tucked up underneath the skull.

Like we see right here in the Sahenthropus.

This is the hole it's called foramen Magnum,

which means big hole.

And it's right here underneath the skull.

So I put it up here,

we can tell that the vertebral column

would have been underneath the head.

In a chimpanzee or a monkey or some other animal

that frame and Magnum would be back here

because it's quadrupedal.

- [Narrator] But Tumai cannot be precisely dated.

The discovers can only estimate his age

at between 6 and 7 million years.

So was Sahelathropus at the very beginning

of our evolution,

or could the finds from Europe be even older?

Right now, it's still no more than a suspicion

because the molar from Bulgaria is only a small indication.

And so far the Jawbone discovered in Athens in 1944

has not been precisely date in either.

Madelaine Bohme is going to have to re-examine it

using state-of-the-art methods.

The trouble is the Jawbone can no longer be found.

She spends two years hunting for it without success.

Finally, she's advised to talk to one

of Bruno Von Freyberg former colleagues,

long since retired.

This is the breakthrough.

- When our collections were partly being dismantled

at the Institute to make space for laboratories.

Professor Von Freiyberg said to me, Dr. Schuffler,

this is the most valuable piece from our collection

treat it with great care.

So the secretary and I placed it in a safe at the Institute.

- [Narrator] Where it remained for many decades.

- When they said, oh, you mean the monkey tooth,

that's in the safe back here.

That was an unbelievable moment.

(speaks in foreign language)

- Then the safe was opened,

and out came a Tupperware container with a label on it,

bearing an exclamation mark in red felt pen.

Important Graecopithecus Freiburg.

Having it handed to me in a Tupperware container, okay.

I guess that was a very good way of storing it,

was still slightly bizarre all the same.

- In 2014, the fossil is taken

to the university of Tubingen.

There the Jawbone of Graecopithecus can finally be examined.

The find is fragile and has also been damaged

during the war.

But the researchers no longer have to rely exclusively

on external anatomical features.

Now they can even explore the inside

of the fossil without destroying it.

High resolution images from a computer tomograph show

every detail of the Jawbone.

The dental roots are decisive here.

What will their analysis reveal?

will they prove typical of a great ape?

- Here, we have a 3D print of the tooth of graecopithecus

that we saw on the computer.

And you can see that the roots are fused

almost to the end.

That's very typical of human dental roots.

And if we look at a chimpanzee tooth,

he has exactly the same tooth and lower jaw, premolar,

we have a wide separation.

Here I have exactly the same tooth,

but human only see one root.

With Graecopithecus, the roots are on the way to fusing.

That is they're partially fused

and they also converge and come together here.

This is the state we know from pre-humans.

- [Narrator] What seems like only a minor detail

at first glance is an important indication

for the researchers that Grecopithecus

belongs to the human lineage,

but is he actually older

than all the African pre-humans discovered so far?

The former Nazi party rally grounds in Nurnberg,

even 75 years after the end of the second World War,

they are still a bizarre monument to national socialism.

This is where Madelaine Bohme finally makes

her successful breakthrough

in dating the rediscovered fossil.

The catacombs of the Congress hall contained

the other fossils that Bruno Von Freyberg collected

in Athens in 1944.

They were handed over

to the Nuremberg Natural History Society,

which keeps them here.

For Madelaine Bohme, this discovery

is like finding buried treasure.

- So he really did mark them in his own handwriting.

We can see that on this one, I think yes, here,

no one knew the importance of this collection.

I knew it had to exist,

but in terms of quality and the number of pieces

I had absolutely no idea.

Without this collection, we'd never have been able

to reconstruct the environment or date things at all.

So this is an absolute treasure.

The Jawbone on its own is all well and good,

but it would have been simply isolated in time and space.

- [Narrator] Ultimately the remains of a very special animal

are key to determining the historical time period.

- The age is always in the rock in the sediment.

This problem here is that we had a drawer full of bones

and the sediment was missing.

But luckily we have draft bones,

and on this bone we did the dating.

There's a drilled hole and if we look inside,

we can see that it's half full of reddish sediment.

And the other half is a cavity.

This sediment was liquid when it flowed into the bone

and settled at the bottom, with the cavity above it.

So this was up and this was down.

With this information, we can date it.

- [Narrator] Since the researchers now know

the original location of the fossil in the rock,

they can determine the orientation

of tiny magnetic particles inside it.

When the sediment was deposited with the bone

and became solid rock,

these particles aligned with the Earth's magnetic field.

Over millions of years, the Earth's magnetic field

reversed time and time again

from North to South pole and back.

But the orientation of the particles

remained fixed inside the rock.

Since we know when these changes in polarity occurred

the age of the rock and can be derived

from this paleomagnetic fingerprint.

It's now clear that not only the giraffe bone,

but also the Jawbone was 7.175 million years old.

Madelaine Bohmer's discovery is a sensation.

Her findings are published in 2017

and cause a huge stir worldwide.

- To me, it wouldn't be surprising to see animals in Europe

that may have been ancestral to Australopiths

or close relatives of Australopiths.

So I think it was really exciting.

It's one fossil and there is debate about it

because it's just a jaw and it doesn't have

post cranial elements.

We don't know about the locomotion.

We don't know a lot about the animal yet,

but the fact that it's a clue that in fact,

they might be relatives of hominids or even ancestral,

that's really exciting.

So I feel like I'm cheering them all on hoping

that they find more.

- [Narrator] Whether or not

our oldest human ancestor actually did come

from Europe and not from Africa

has not yet been conclusively proven

by Madelaine Bohme's discovery.

The molar and the Jawbone are important indications,

but not yet clear evidence.

But then on Crete, a further important clue surfaces.

On the Northwest coast of the island,

Madelaine Bohme meets an international research team.

In 2002, close to present day, tequilas

of Polish paleontologist

discovered mysterious fossilized footprints.

They bear the traces of bipedalism, a crucial feature

that distinguishes our early ancestors from great apes.

And they're around 6 million years old,

older than almost all the fines in Africa.

- So that's the heel.

This is the outline of the whole print.

There you go, that's the ball,

the big toe on the smaller side toes.

That's the whole thing.

- [Narrator] The shape of the foot

and the forward pointing toes

really are reminiscent of human footprints.

It seems out of the question that they were made

by an animal that only stood briefly on its hind legs,

because there are no clues

such as claw marks or anything similar.

- These footprints, as far as we can tell

are footprints of hominids.

In other words, early members of our own lineage.

And they are the earliest hominid footprints known anywhere

in the world by a considerable margin,

maybe at least 3 million years or so.

And I love them because they are a record of life.

Think about that, I mean, you know, if you've found like,

you know, the skeleton of an early hominid, that would,

of course be cool, but it's the skeleton of a dead hominid.

What we have here is it's like a sort

of static film clip in stone of a family of live hominids,

not only is it the case that the surfaces

that you see reflected in the stone

is the actual living flesh of the foot, right.

But you're seeing behavior.

(upbeat music)

- In Tanzania, comparable traces were discovered in 1978,

the locality is called Laetoli.

The imprints are from pre-humans

probably even relatives of Lucy.

However, they are only 3.6 million years old,

much younger than those of the mysterious bipeds on Crete.

They lived at a far earlier evolutionary phase as proven

by dating of the sandstone

in which their tracks are preserved.

But the researchers can interpret even more

from this locality.

- We've got a shoreline here, maybe it's a lagoon,

maybe a little river Delta,

we're not quite sure,

but we're very close to the water's edge.

And along comes a presumably a little family group

of this hominids looking from a distance,

they look kind of like little hairy humans,

or like little chimpanzees that somebody

is taught to walk on the back legs.

The taller signs might be about a meter 40 in height or so,

the youngsters, perhaps half that.

And what are they doing? Well,

they seem to be just wandering around to guess

they're probably foraging for food at the water's edge,

the footprints on the surface, sort of meander around.

There's no very clear pattern.

It's not like they're purposefully walking

in some direction.

They actually look like they're having a nice day

on the beach.

- [Narrator] In the next step, the researchers want

to date the rock strata with the mysterious footprints

even more precisely

The results will only be definite later on.

They are crucial for determining precisely

when bipedalism first began,

because it's only found in humans and their ancestors.

- This very question of bipedalism is key to differentiating

between early chimpanzees and pre-humans.

The only way to answer it 100% is from the footprints.

Of course, a bone can also be interpreted

as having come from a biped,

but it's the footprint itself

that provides the ultimate proof.

- [Narrator] But how can they prove that the footprints

on Crete actually came from pre-humans

Madelaine Bohme travels

to an animal park in Southern Germany.

Here together with her preparator Heinrich Stewart.

She wants to carry out an unusual investigation.

The Schwaben Park in Kaisersbach is one of the few places

where chimpanzees can be seen outside zoos.

- Shoe laces, you're interested in those aren't you?

They're feet inside and they look different from yours.

well, it's time to tie them up again

otherwise we can't go for a walk, can we?

You want me to do something? Don't you, ah,

you wanted to see what I smell like.

That's a wristwatch Jenny, humans have those

because stressed out the whole time.

Yeah, it's a watch.

It's interesting, isn't it?

It's used to measure time.

The time we have here on earth.

- [Narrator] Who's watching who? Madelaine Bohme

is not dealing with ancient bones here,

but with a creature that has a will of its own.

- You're doing that perfectly.

Where did you learn to do that?

- [Narrator] She'll have to be patient

if she wants to take a footprint from the Chimp,

because that's the real aim of the visit.

Precise footprints of chimpanzees are hard to come by.

Even for experts, a box with sediment is prepared.

Will Jenny the chimpanzee play along.

A first attempt, Jenny is still suspicious.

It's clear that she finds

the soft sediment less than appealing.

Getting an accurate footprint

proves to be more difficult than expected,

but only a footprint showing the anatomy in detail

will be enough for a comparison

with the footprints found on Crete.

A second attempt, and Jenny is still skeptical.

This time Madeline Burma lends a firm hand

and it works.

- We've done it, wow, Jenny, fantastic, that's great.

Excellent, super Jenny.

- [Narrator] As the basis for a precise

three-dimensional reconstruction on the computer later on,

Madelyn Burma, quickly photographs

the fresh footprint from all sites.

The differences in comparison to the footprint

from Crete are quite clear.

- On the print from Crete, the ball of the foot is huge.

And this feature is missing with the chimp.

A chimpanzee's toe is at a big angle to its foot.

Here it's almost 90 degrees, with human footprints

the toes are very close together.

The lateral digital impressions are very small here

and get even smaller whereas here they're quite big,

so significant differences.

- [Narrator] The chimpanzees foot

can grip almost like a hand,

enabling it to grab branches easily.

By comparison, the footprints from Crete

are far more similar to those of modern man.

The shape of the foot indicates that its owner was a biped.

With chimpanzees however, not only the foot shape,

but the entire anatomy is optimized

for walking on all fours.

- The knee is angled too,

you have a fairly short lumbar spine.

It's quite short here because you prefer everything

to be angled.

Then you're walking upright,

and you can always see your angle, always the angle.

Now you can really see it properly.

And now you're standing on two legs, wonderful.

- [Narrator] Jenny and needs a break.

She's certainly earned her treat.

- The footprint from track loss are clearly human,

the question is, were they great apes or bipedal hominids?

It's now clear that they were bipedal pre-humans.

The comparison with the Chimp here

leaves no other possibility.

- [Narrator] Comparing the footprints has been worthwhile,

and it suggests that bipedalism

could have originated in Europe.

But what could have triggered

the start of the human lineage in Europe?

Bulgaria may hold the key to this.

The single molar of Graecopithecus

was discovered there in 2009.

the locality of former Riverbed in the lowlands of Threes.

- I suspect that the early prehuman hominids

like Grecopithecus especially had a close connection

to river systems, that would've given them drinking water

and different vegetation from that in the open Savannah.

- [Narrator] Might there be even more bones

of pre-humans hidden at the excavation site,

that kind of find would be like winning the lottery.

From the air, the course of the ancient river

is clearly visible.

The locality was discovered by accident.

A company was mining some sand there

for highway construction.

At the excavation site, Madelaine Bohme

meets Nikolai Spassov, the Director

of the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia.

The Bulgarian researchers have discovered thousands

of fossils of extinct animals here over the years.

Madelaine Bohme has already assisted them several times

with their excavations.

In this season two, revealing new bones have been recovered.

The leg bones of an extinct species

of giraffe, for instance,

The bones have to be put in plaster

to make them easier to recover.

The preparation only takes place later on in the lab.

- Every year we have many new bones, for example,

very interesting is now the mandible

of relatively small carnivore.

It could be a relatively small cat, but we will see after.

And this is a part of-

- Oh, yes, it's a cat, that nice.

- Most probably, yeah.

Yeah, great.

- A tibia for rhino, this top part of tibia.

we have here Seratotelium the so-called white rhino.

Now white rhino exist in Africa,

of course, with another species.

But the beginning of these genus is here in Savannah,

old Savannah, some of the Balkans.

Our secret is a new bone after the tooth,

femur of hominid and it could be our graecopithecus.

- Can I see? - Yes, of course.

In this moment it is understudy.

This bone is extremely promising

for understanding the locomotion of this hominid.

- [Narrator] Since the original is extremely fragile.

Spassov shows Madelyn Burma, a replica.

- Our team is very proud with this.

- Oh yes, you can be proud.

- I'm surprised, great Nikolai congratulations.

- Thank you.

- [Narrator] If it's confirmed

that the bone belonged to Grecopithecus

and if it reveals signs of bipedalism,

that would be further important proof.

What's more the other fossils from Azmaca

revealed that not only Greece,

but also Bulgaria had a landscape

like that of today's Africa.

In a nearby museum, the researchers

have even reconstructed whole skeletons from that phase.

The endothelium, an ancient elephant

with downward curving tusks, a hyena,

and a saber toothed cat.

With the help of all the fossils, the animal world,

to which Grecopithecus once belonged

can be precisely reconstructed.

In an artist's impression, the researchers

have brought that world back to life.

A Savannah filled with the forebears of today's elephants,

gazelles, rhinos, and zebras,

which once extended across vast regions

of the Eastern Mediterranean.

And in the midst of them all Grecopithecus

as he might once have looked.

It was Charles Darwin, Founder of the theory of evolution,

who first suspected that the origins

of humankind lay in a Savannah.

This idea became known as the Savannah hypothesis.

According to it, our ancestors had to adapt

to the disappearance of the forests,

their original home, by standing upright on two legs.

That meant that their hands were now free to make tools,

for example, bipedalism also guaranteed a better overview.

An interpretation for which Darwin

was mocked by many contemporaries as in this cartoon.

Assuming that the cradle of humanity is in Africa,

the Savannah hypothesis is actually untenable because there

was hardly any Savannah there 7 million years ago,

but mainly forest with the fines from Europe, however,

the hypothesis is gaining a new lease of life.

- The African savannas appeared far later,

only 2 or 3 million years ago.

The Savannah's here are much, much older

around 7 million years old.

And these very old non-African savannas

now contain an early prehuman.

This doesn't place the whole theory of evolution in doubt,

but it does shift it to a much earlier time

and also significantly to an entirely different continent.

- [Narrator] But the fauna is only part of the picture.

Does the flora support this new Savannah hypothesis as well?

In the sediment surrounding the greet fossils,

Madelaine Bohme discovers tiny courts like particles.

These are so-called, phyllolith formed by plants

and differ depending on different genera.

They are highly resilient and can survive

for millions of years.

With these tiny plant particles, Madelaine Bohme

can show that the region at that time

was indeed predominantly grassland.

Long before similar environmental changes began in Africa,

the forests in the Mediterranean region

were already in decline.

As a result of sinking temperatures

and increasing aridity.

And there is also something else to suggest

that humans originated in Europe.

At the university of Toronto,

Paleo anthropologist, David Begon has been researching

the Genesis of great apes and humans for 40 years.

And his work is coming up with some surprises.

In the phase when the lineages of today's great apes

were forming, these animals lived mainly in Europe.

Hundreds of such fossils have come to light

since the mid 19th century.

The new finds from Bulgaria and Greece are line with this.

In Africa, on the other hand, the ancestors

of the great apes left virtually no traces

during this phase.

Although conditions in Europe

became increasingly difficult for them

due to climatic changes,

they managed to populate a huge region,

their strategy, quite simply intelligence.

- They were smart, they had big brains,

they had bigger brains than any monkey has.

They have bigger brains than any given has.

They had brains the size of relative

to their body size of chimpanzees.

And that doesn't happen unless there's a good reason for it.

Brains are metabolically very, very expensive,

and you don't get a big brain.

You don't maintain a large brain

unless you use it for something.

Hey Andrew, how you doing.

- [Narrator] Shortly before the beginning

of our own evolution, great apes in Europe

experienced a golden age.

But to this day, these finds

have hardly been noticed by researchers.

- There is a widespread concept that African apes

and humans evolved in Africa and have always been in Africa

and never left Africa.

And they may have had some offshoots that went roaming

into Europe, but basically everything happens in Africa.

You can't ignore the evidence that we actually have,

and you can't just be dismissive of the evidence we have

by saying, well, I know that we're going to find

a more relevant evidence that will be contradictory,

or that will prove my preconception,

that everything happened in Africa in the future,

but we just haven't found it yet.

That's just not very good science in my opinion.

- [Narrator] Researchers are gaining

an increasingly accurate idea

of what the European great apes were like.

And the number of fines from new excavations

continues to grow.

The Alpine foothills in the south of Germany,

since 2011 in this clay pit Madelaine Bohme

and her team have been excavating the fossilized remains

of animals that lived here 11.6 million years ago.

Large turtles and giant salamanders

once swam in a river here.

On its banks, there were prehistoric pigs

and ancestors of the elephants.

Even an early Panda has been discovered.

- That's a great find.

- [Narrator] Every day the researchers

come across new bones, like this vertebra

of a forest antelope, perfectly preserved.

(upbeat music)

But what makes this locality unique are 37 fossils

of a new species of great ape that were discovered here.

It's one of the most significant finds of this kind ever.

The clay has even preserved parts of the skeleton.

- If we have such complete bones of the skeleton,

we can say a great deal

about the animal's musculoskeletal system

and their way of life,

far more than with skull fragments or teeth.

These comparatively long ulna is almost as long as mine,

tells us that the arms were far longer than the legs.

That's a typical feature of great apes.

Great apes climbing in trees and swinging along.

The tibia however, is quite short,

shorter than the in ulna.

In humans it's the other way round,

our tibia is longer than the ulna.

But this tibia at the end is built in such a way

that it shows us that the great ape

walked with straight knees.

Also the ankle here has the same structure as our human one,

directionally aligned for walking

rather than for climbing trees.

So we see this as a hybrid form,

which can be a precursor of today's human bipedalism,

and can also be a precursor of the tree dwelling,

four legged existence of great apes.

A genuine transition, a missing link.

- [Narrator] The researchers named their find,

Danuvius guggunmosi, but it's also known as udo,

that's because of the day on which the first fossil

was discovered was the 70th birthday

of the popular German musician Udo Lintonberg whose songs

were constantly being played on the radio that day,

a parallel to the famous Lucy from Africa

who was named after a Beatle song.

- When you dig you take what you get of course,

but naturally if we had a complete skull of Udo

or Danuvius guggenmosi we'd know a great deal more

about his brain size, for example.

We could maybe say more about his direct evolutionary

relationship to chimpanzees and humans too.

If we had a complete foot, we could be more certain

about bipedalism and the distance he could cover.

The important thing is that we have the key

in our hand, when it comes to really being able

to answer that in the future.

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- [Narrator] 15% Of Udo skeleton has now come to light,

including fossils from many different anatomical regions.

A key advantage when it comes

to getting a more accurate picture of this great ape.

To get a better idea of the body's proportions.

The fossils are laid out with missing parts,

substituted by replica's.

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The replicas can be produced on a 3D printer

by mirroring the left tibia, for instance,

the right one can be copied.

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- In the old days that had to be modeled manually

with putty or clay and

now we get a one to one image just by mirroring it.

That really helps us with this reconstruction.

And even if it's just a copy,

it still brings us that much closer to our ancestor.

- No comparable find has been made anywhere in Africa.

Together with the other extinct great apes from Europe,

Udo is a further indication that it was in Europe,

that our evolution began.

Even the size and weight of this great ape

already correspond to later species of pre-humans.

This reconstruction shows Udo standing upright

with his legs and hips straight.

Everything points to the fact that he is a common ancestor

of humans and chimpanzees, and he's a European,

But why don't any comparable African finds exist

from this period?

Madelaine Bohme came across a possible explanation.

An electron microscope takes an even closer look

at the sediment around the lower jaw of Grecopithecus

and traces are found of a massive environmental change

that hit north Africa at that time.

Magnified 10,000 times, the tiny dust particles

making up most of the sediment,

form a very special geological fingerprint.

This shape of particle and specific patterns on its surface

are only formed when dust is blown by wind.

The individual dust grains collide again and again,

and grind each other down.

The chemical composition of the rock is also clear,

and it proves that this dust came from the Sahara.

- There were huge amounts of dust at that time,

up to a quarter kilogram of dust per square meter

was deposited each year, that's a huge amount.

Areas like that do still exist,

but they're very inhospitable.

Today, we have that level of dust in the Sahara zone

where vast amounts were blown off the Sahara desert,

and back then Southern Greece have the same level of dust.

- [Narrator] This is the first time the researchers

have been able to date the earliest known Sahara face

with precision.

It must've been at least as long ago as Graecopithecus' age.

That is 7.2 million years,

several million years earlier than previously assumed.

If humankind really did originate in Europe,

this vast desert would certainly have been a barrier,

one that our early ancestors could not have crossed.

But this early desert phase was followed again by a period

with a humid climate during which the Sahara was covered

with green vegetation.

It was during this phase, which coincides with the emergence

of the oldest African finds

that early human ancestors coming from Europe

could easily have reached Africa via the middle east.

And they could have slowly spread to Africa in this way

and continued their evolution there

after an initial European chapter

as African fossil finds suggest.

The ancestors of the chimpanzees and gorillas could also

have taken this route from Europe to Africa,

maybe they followed the receding forests

as far as the equatorial areas of Africa,

where they could continue to live in trees.

One species, however, Grecopithecus took a different route.

He remained in Europe, adapted to the Savannah environment

and established a new lineage, that of humankind.

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Perhaps the researchers will soon encounter new finds

in the Mediterranean region as well

to further support their ideas.

Madelaine Bohme is going to continue following these traces.

For her, this is just the beginning of further research.

- They've been various spectacular discoveries

from recent research, that throw an entirely new light

on the role of Europe in the origin of man.

It's fantastic to be a part of all this.

And I'm really excited about what we're going to find next.

- [Narrator] One thing seems to be clear above all,

evolution doesn't fit in neatly

with human geographical categories.

Over millions of years, driven by environmental changes,

humankind seems to have steadily evolved

across a large region that initially encompassed Europe

and later Africa.

Humans constantly populated new habitats,

and in the process cross borders between entire continents.

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