Human footprints boggle the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossil footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record moments in the lives of many different extinct organisms, The earliest creatures that walked on four legs380 million years ago.
The discovery of tracks made by hominins – our ancient relatives – in East Africa is telling paleontologists like us about the behavior of hominin species that walked on two legs and looked like us but were not yet humans. Our new research focuses on footprints This surprisingly records two different species of hominin walking along the shore of the same Kenyan lake at the same time, about 1.5 million years ago.
Studying such ancient tracks is filled with exciting fragments of the story of human evolution because they provide evidence for hominin behavior and locomotion that scientists cannot learn from fossil bones.
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