Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity at Laetoli, Tanzania

McNutt, E. J., Hatala, K. G., Miller, C., Adams, J., Casana, J., Deane, A. S., Dominy, N. J., Fabian, K., Fannin, L. D., Gaughan, S., Gill, S. V., Gurtu, J., Gustafson, E., Hill, A. C., Johnson, C., Kallindo, S., Kilham, B., Kilham, P., Kim, E., Liutkus-Pierce, C., Maley, B., Prabhat, A., Reader, J., Rubin, S., Thompson, N.E., Thornburg, R., Williams-Hatala, E.M., Zimmer, B., Musiba, C.M., & DeSilva, J. M.

Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity at Laetoli, Tanzania

2021

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Animals
Archives
Female
Foot
Fossils
Gait
Hominidae
Humans
Imaging, Three-Dimensional
Lasers
Male
Models, Biological
Pan troglodytes
Photogrammetry
Phylogeny
Tanzania
Ursidae

English

Bipedal trackways discovered in 1978 at Laetoli site G, Tanzania and dated to 3.66 million years ago are widely accepted as the oldest unequivocal evidence of obligate bipedalism in the human lineage1–3. Another trackway discovered two years earlier at nearby site A was partially excavated and attributed to a hominin, but curious affinities with bears (ursids) marginalized its importance to the paleoanthropological community, and the location of these footprints fell into obscurity3–5. In 2019, we located, excavated and cleaned the site A trackway, producing a digital archive using 3D photogrammetry and laser scanning. Here we compare the footprints at this site with those of American black bears, chimpanzees and humans, and we show that they resemble those of hominins more than ursids. In fact, the narrow step width corroborates the original interpretation of a small, cross-stepping bipedal hominin. However, the inferred foot proportions, gait parameters and 3D morphologies of footprints at site A are readily distinguished from those at site G, indicating that a minimum of two hominin taxa with different feet and gaits coexisted at Laetoli. © 2021, The Author(s).

Nature, Volume 600, Issue 7889, December 2021, pages 468-471

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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