Fossil Footprints Suggest Two Early Human Species Crossed Paths within Hours

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November 28, 2024

3 min read

Two sets of fossilized footprints from early human species were made within a few hours of each other about 1.5 million years ago, researchers suggest

By Tom Metcalfe

Scientists think this footprint was made by a Paranthropus boisei individual.

Kevin G. Hatala

Footprints from two different types of ancient primates related to humans—one of them a human ancestor—were likely left within hours of each other along the shoreline of a lake in what is now Kenya. The astonishing discovery of these fossilized footfalls confirms that the two hominin species lived side by side, and it offers insight into how they might have cooperated or competed.

“We didn’t know we had two species when we were excavating them,” says Kevin Hatala , a paleoanthropologist at Chatham University and lead author of a study of the footprints, which was published on Thursday in Science. “It was only after several months of analysis and ruling out all possible alternative explanations that we said, ‘We think we’ve got something special here, something that we haven’t seen before.’”

The fossil footprints were discovered in 2021 during excavations in Kenya near Lake Turkana. Over many decades, the area around the lake has yielded thousands of fossils—including many that belong to our own genus, Homo—that have been crucial to the scientific understanding of human evolution . The dozens of footprints in the 2021 find were made about 1.5 million years ago in soft sediments beside the lake, then covered by other sediments and eventually fossilized.

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When examining the footprints, Hatala, who is an expert on the evolution of human feet , noticed that some resembled those of modern humans, whereas many others looked more primitive. He and his colleagues used three-dimensional imaging to determine the modern-looking footprints were made by an individual from the species Homoerectus, which lived between 1.89 million and 110,000 years ago and was an ancestor of modern humans .

But others were made … Read More