The Laetoli footprints capture early hominins walking upright
- Date
- c. 3.66 million years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- East Africa (Tanzania)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 1978 a team associated with Mary Leakey uncovered, at Laetoli in northern Tanzania, trails of fossil footprints preserved in a layer of volcanic ash that had hardened after a rain shower roughly 3.66 million years ago.
The prints — the oldest unambiguous hominin footprints known — were almost certainly made by Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as 'Lucy.' Their anatomy is decisive: the big toe lies in line with the other toes rather than splaying outward like an ape's, and the impressions show a heel-strike and weight transfer indicating habitual upright walking. The trackways provide direct behavioural evidence, not just skeletal inference, that committed bipedalism was established in the genus Australopithecus more than a million years before the appearance of the genus Homo or of stone tools. Multiple parallel trails, including a possible larger individual, hint at group movement and at marked body-size variation within the species. Fragile and at risk from erosion and vegetation, the Laetoli footprints remain one of the most evocative and scientifically important traces of our deep ancestry.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
- Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreedingc. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
- Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamericac. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
- Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basinc. 8000–6000 BCE
- Domestication of the dog, humanity's first domesticated animalc. 16,000 – 14,000 years ago
- Earliest Controlled Use of Fire by Homo erectusc. 1,000,000 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
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