We’re used to partial evidence, dead ends, and red herrings. It’s especially hard to reconstruct ancient behaviors, something we are particularly interested in. We must rely on either skeletal remains or the physical things left behind by ancient people to deduce anything about their lives, be it what they ate, how they moved or the origins of complex behaviors like creating tools or communicating with language.
It’s the most abundant assemblage of ancient human footprints currently known from Africa and suggests this ancient community had a division of labor between the adult females and males.Footprints are unique in that they are a preserved moment in time when an animal moved across a landscape and left traces of its movements imprinted in the ground.
For the human lineage, footprint sites have been especially important in furthering scientists’ understanding of our own evolutionary journey. The iconic 3.66-million-year-old paleontologicalin Tanzania, for instance, provided some of the earliest definitive evidence of upright walking in our ancient ancestors.
That’s exactly what happened thousands of years ago when a group of at least 20 prehistoric modern humans walked through a volcanic mudflow produced by the Oldoinyo L’engai volcano, still active today in what’s now Tanzania.
Have I ever not been disappointed by the article behind a PopSci headline? No.