The bones they found in the sand were a clue that something more was buried beneath the surface. But these remarkably preserved footprints were the first to indicate that two different species of hominins — including Homo erectus, which is a direct ancestor to humans, and Paranthropus boisei, which was a different species that also descended from the ape ancestor …
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. “It’s surprising that you would have two kinds of similarly sized, large-bodied hominin species on the same landscape,” said Kevin Hatala, first author of a study on the footprints that published in the journal Science on Thursday. Briana Pobiner, a research scientist and museum educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural …
