Footprints Reveal 2 Extinct Hominin Species Living Side By Side

Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Kevin Hatala & Purity Kiura/The Conversation

Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants in the lives of many different extinct organisms, back to the earliest creatures that walked on four feet, 380 million years ago.

Discoveries in eastern Africa of tracks made by hominins – our ancient relatives – are telling paleontologists like ourselves about the behavior of hominin species that walked on two feet and resembled us but were not yet human like we are today. Our new research focuses on footprints that amazingly record two different species of hominins walking along the same Kenyan lakeshore at the same time, roughly 1.5 million years ago.

Studying ancient tracks like these fills in exciting pieces of the human evolution story because they provide evidence for hominin behavior and locomotion that scientists cannot learn from fossilized bones.