Archaeologists have said that the study of an ancient 17 million year old whale fossil has provided clues about the birthplace of humanity in East Africa.

The study said that whale used to live in the East African plateau when it was still considerably lower and had dense forests. According to archaeologists, the fossil gives clues to when the uplift in the plateau happened, which turned the dried-out region into a savannah and it forced tree-living ancestors of humanity to start walking upright.

"It's more or less the story about the bipedalism," said Henry Wichura, one of the study's researchers and geoscience postdoctoral candidate and Germany's University of Potsdam.

Earlier, researchers had failed to pinpoint a more specific period when the uplift began. However, with the fossil's discovery, scientists are learning when exactly the shift began, which researchers now estimate to happen "sometime between 17 million and 13.5 million years ago."

"The whale is telling us all kinds of things," Louis L. Jacobs, the study's co-author, was quoted by University Herald as saying. "It tells us the starting point for all that uplift that changed the climate that led to humans. It's amazing."

"The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle," Jacobs explained. "As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands. Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that's when - in human evolution - the primates started to walk upright."

The whale fossil was discovered decades ago but it was studied in detail only recently.

"The beaked whale fossil was discovered in 1964 by J.G. Mead in what is now the Turkana region of northwest Kenya," Science Daily noted. "Over the years, the Kenya whale fossil went missing in storage."