News Muncher - searching for footprints

1.5 million-years-old footprints reveal unknown secret about human species

A new study has unveiled fossilised footprints from two ancient human species, Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, that coexisted in northern Kenya approximately 1.5 million years ago. Discovered at the Koobi Fora site near Lake Turkana, these footprints provide the first physical evidence that these distinct species shared the same landscape, raising intriguing questions about their interactions and potential competition …

Footprints

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 …

Discovery of 1.5 million-year-old footprints shows two different human ancestors lived alongside each other

Discovery of fossilized footprints reveals the moment two ancient human species crossed paths

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 …

New tests confirm antiquity of ancient human footprints in New Mexico

Humans trod the landscape of North America thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to new research that confirms the antiquity of fossilised footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico using two further dating approaches. The footprints date to about 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating techniques, researchers said on …