Ever wonder what your 1.5 million year old ancestor may have actually looked like? Well, we still may not have the answer to that one but we have come another step closer.
It would appear that our early human ancestors had feet very much like our own and we now know this for sure after a 1.5 million year old male, size 9 footprint was found in fossile rock in Africa’s northern Kenya region.
This new find makes the human print the oldest on record proving that our ground-roving, upright-stanced human-like ancestors go back much further than previously believed. We can now say with some certainty that at least 1.5 million years ago our human ancestors had left their tree habits for an upright life on the African savanna.
Commenting on the find one of Rutgers University anthropologists, Dr. John Harris, who is investigating the find, stated that “….it’s like putting flesh on the bones. The prints are so well preserved.”
Reporting their findings in the February edition of the Science journal, Harris and his collegues believe the prints likely to belong to an earlier version of Homo erectus, termed Homo ergaster. The print is very similar to that of humans, follows a human gait and spacing with a well-rounded heel and typical human toe arrangement. It differs significantly from the apes of the same period which had very curved fingers and toes, an anatomy needed for clinging, hanging and grasping of vines and branches.
This find could move the onset of “modern man” back to as much as 2 million years, the time of the famous Lucy skeleton. These print findings fit nicely into other recent findings such as ancient tool making evidence that also date back to around the same 1.5 to 2 million time period. Finding modern-like human foot prints only adds credence to the idea that the “modern” human genus has been around a lot longer that science had previously held.
“We’re seeing a very different hominid at this stage,” Harris said. “You might even think in terms of dietary quality here, because maybe they’re incorporating more meat into their diet. They would have competed with quite a large carnivore guild; lions, leopards, and all the cats that eat meat.”
These newly-discovered footprints definitely “add flesh” to what is known about the foot structure of Homo erectus (and ergaster), and it is great news that previous assumptions about their foot anatomy being like ours have been confirmed.
I would like to point out a few inaccuracies in your reporting, however.
This discovery does not push the onset of modern man back to 2 million years– Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were not (and still are not) considered modern humans. They have always been believed to possess a very human-like post-cranial anatomy, and this discovery reaffirms it.
Also, Lucy (Astralopithecus afarensis) is currently believed to be about 3.4 million years old, not 2. And she is a far cry from modern humans anatomically, although she is obviously important as one of the earliest bipedal hominids.
Lastly, the footprints discovered at Laetoli by Mary Leakey in 1976 have already demonstrated that human ancestors “left their tree habits for an upright life on the African savanna” as much as 3.6 million years ago.
Ah….but those prints found by Leakey over 30 years ago at Laetoli still remain a point of debate and contention among anthropologists across the globe as to their origin and age. These newest prints are not under question by the scientific community as a whole.
You are correct in pointing out that erectus/ergaster are not “modern humans.” It would have been more accurate for me to have indicated that they are considered a prototype, or early version, of what would become known as the “modern man”.