Nearly 1.5 million years ago, human ancestors living in Kenya walked in a manner similar to ours, as shown by footprints recently discovered in the muddy terrain of Ileret. The evolution of human upright walking is fascinating, and it takes us back millions of years ago, but apparently it wasn’t until Homo erectus (or Homo ergaster) that our ancestors developed the ability to walk upright in a manner similar to the one we see today.
Africa was the cradle of two essential links in our evolution, the “working man” (Homo ergaster) and the “upright man” (Homo erectus). Homo ergaster is sometimes considered to be a subspecies of Homo erectus, who in turn is believed to be the first human ancestor to leave Africa.
Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, whose study appears this week in the journal Science, has managed to obtain at least four trails of footprints from the Kenyan site, which offer an incredible insight into that part of human evolution, and belong to one of the two.
Researchers working on the footprints have managed to make some estimations on the weight stride length, and gait of the human ancestors who are now under discussion. Their research revealed that these humans were pushing off the ground with their big toes and shifting their weight over these digits, just like modern humans do.
David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers involved in the study, said in a telephone interview with Reuters: It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site.
The oldest set of footprints dates back 3.6 million years ago, and appears to have been made by an Australopithecus, an extinct species which is considered to be one of our primitive human ancestors. These hominids populated eastern and northern Africa between 3.9 and 3 million years ago, and left us with the earliest evidence of bipedal hominids at a site in Tanzania.
However, unlike the 1.5 million-year-old footprints belonging to a Homo ergaster or Homo erectus, these sets, which are 2 million years older, reveal that the Australopithecus had longer toes, a shallower arch, and an ape-like big toe that jutted away from the other toes (these footprints are believed to have been left by an Australopithecus afarensis).
As opposed to that, Homo erectus, one of the representatives of the hunter-gatherer society, is the first hominid to resemble the most modern Homo sapiens. Homo erectus is also thought to be the first hominid to have traveled over water with the help of rafts, but that theory is still controversial.
