1,000,000 and a half years in the past, amid large storks and the ancestors of antelopes, two extinct kin of people walked alongside the identical muddy lakeshore in what’s right this moment northern Kenya, new analysis suggests.
An excavation crew uncovered 4 units of footprints preserved within the mud on the Turkana Basin, a web site that has led to necessary breakthroughs in understanding human evolution. The discovery, introduced on Thursday in a paper within the journal Science, is direct proof that completely different sorts of human kin, with distinct anatomies and gaits, inhabited the identical place on the identical time, the paper’s authors say.
It additionally raises questions in regards to the extent of the species’ interactions with one another.
“They might need walked by each other,” stated Kevin Hatala, an evolutionary anthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who led the research. “They might need regarded up within the distance and seen one other member of a intently associated species, occupying the identical panorama.”
Based on skeletal stays discovered within the area, Dr. Hatala’s crew attributed the footprints to Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus, two sorts of hominins, the group consisting of our human lineage and intently associated species. Paranthropus boisei had smaller brains together with extensive, flat faces and large tooth and chewing muscle tissues; Homo erectus extra intently resembled trendy human proportions and are regarded as our direct ancestors.
Scientists have lengthy recognized that various kinds of hominins coexisted on Earth. Homo sapiens, who emerged solely round 300,000 years in the past, shared the planet with Neanderthals and Denisovans for hundreds of years. Traces of their DNA are nonetheless current in us right this moment.
But proof of species overlap and the way conduct differed from one species to a different is generally inferred from bones. Such fossils are sometimes preserved in irregular methods, or present in sediments that accumulate over millenniums. This can result in a big margin of error in relationship.
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