Earliest modern-looking human footprints
04 March 2009
The earliest modern-looking human footprints have been uncovered in Kenya, scientists report in the journal Science.
© Professor Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University
They are about 1.5 million years old and show evidence of a human foot and a modern human style of walking.
Scientists think they were made by an ancient human relative, Homo erectus, a species that lived in Africa long before our species, Homo sapiens.
Comparing footprints
Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University and his team took laser scans of the footprints found at Ileret, in northern Kenya, and compared the resulting 3D models and information with those from modern humans. They found them to be very similar to ours.
‘These new prints confirm that the human pattern of walking was established nearly two million years ago,’ says Professor Chris Stringer, human origins expert at Natural History Museum.
‘This is valuable information, since we still lack well-preserved foot skeletons of the species concerned, Homo erectus.’
Oldest footprints
The oldest footprints from a human relative are dated at about 3.6 million years old and were found at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1978.
These have been attributed to Australopithecus afarensis, a more ancient human relative that walked upright.
However, the Laetoli footprints do not show evidence of a modern human way of walking, like the new finds do.
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