If one enters “dinosaur” and “human footprint” together in an internet search, which The Tracker does not recommend as the result may be dispiriting, up come myriad young-Earth creationist websites asserting geological evidence that dinosaurs and people co-existed. Science of the more normal sort can’t even come close to that sensation. The best it can do is in Science Magazine this week. There, researchers from multiple institutions report evidence that a “mere” 1.5 million years ago human ancestors walked along a bluff near today’s Lake Turkana in Kenya by planting their feet in more or less exactly the way Homo sapiens does today. The most suspected pedestrians: Homo erectus, also presumed to be the last (and smaller-brained) common ancestor to us and our cousin the Neanderthal. Some experts, depending on how keen they are to lump or split our ancestry into few or many branches, might ascribe it to Homo ergaster. Either way, it’s not us but it’s close.  It gets extraordinarily wide pickup by news media.

The import for paleoanthropologists is that this gives a waymarker between today and the only other ancient hominid footprints known, left by Australopithecus afarensis (as in “Lucy”) 3.7 million years ago. Those, as related well by the NYTimes‘s John Noble Wilford this morning, show a very different foot structure and stride. The new prints, adds Wilford, are the first direct indication how H. erectus and its close kin walked as no foot bone fossils from the species are yet known.

Other stories:

• Scientific American Katherine Harmon: Researchers Uncover 1.5-Million-Year-Old Footprints ;
• Reuters Will Dunham: Footprints show human ancestor with modern stride ;
• AFP : Another ancient fossil found in Kenya ; For such well-arched feet that’s a remarkably flat headline. The story’s fine, if brief. But one notes that it has auto-generated Google map illus pointing at locations mentioned in the dateline or text. AP sometimes does this automated Google mapping too. It’s not helpful – too many datelines are many miles, even half a world, away from the actual news site.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Footprints of ancient Man point the way out of Africa ; Clever hed, as H. erectus is widely believed to be the earliest of our ancestors to spread into the greater part of the Old World.
• Nat’l Geographic John Roach :  Oldest Human Footprints With Modern Anatomy Found ;
• Science News Bruce Bower : Modern feet step back 1.5 million years ;
• Wired News Brandon Keim : Walk Like Us: 1.5 Million-Year-Old Footprints Look Modern ;
• BBC: Earliest ‘human footprints’ found ; Smart use of qualifying quote marks – it is not clear if all members, or how many of, the genus Homo can be equated with human.
• Philadelphia Inquirer Tom Avril : Footprints offer clue on path of modern man ; Avril explores with some care why this is exciting to experts in the field, and what it says about how much these creatures were on their two feet ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW Ann Gibbons: Early Humans Toed the Line ;
• .. could do more

Grist for the Mill: Rutgers University Press Release (via ScienceDaily) ; George Washington University Press Release ;

Note: The Tracker is never consistent in typography style, but readers may notice a different look to these bullets. The bylines are linked, the heds are in italics. More commonly with bullets in previous posts the link is through the headline. Just experimenting. An early intention with this site was to, when sensible, link through bylines if possible. I’ve gotten at times away from that. But doing so serves to emphasize that this site’s attention is as much on reporters and the process of news writing, editing, and presentation as it is on the importance of the news events themselves. I’ll digest it awhile, may stick with this style, may not….

-CP

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.