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Mysterious fossil footprints

may cast doubt on human
evolution timeline

Michael Irving September 1, 2017

A set of fossilized human-like footprints in Greece may end up
rewriting the story of human evolution (Credit: Andrzej Boczarowski)

VIEW GALLERY - 2 IMAGES

We share plenty of features with apes, but the shape of our feet isn't

one of them. So that makes the discovery of human-like footprints

dating back 5.7 million years a time when our ancestors were

thought to still be getting around on ape-like feet a surprising one.

Further confounding the mystery is the fact that these prints were

found in the Greek islands, implying hominins left Africa much earlier

than our current narrative suggests.

Fossilized bones and footprints have helped us piece together the

history of human evolution. One of the earliest hominins ancestors of

ours that are more closely related to humans than chimps was a

species called Ardipithecus ramidus, which is known from over 100

specimens. Living about 4.4 million years ago, it had an ape-like foot,

with the hallux (the big toe) pointing out sideways rather than falling
in line like ours. Fast-forward about 700,000 years, and a set of

footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania shows that a more human foot

shape had evolved by then.

Enter the newly-discovered footprints. Found in Trachilos in western

Crete, they have a distinctly human-like shape, with a big toe of a

similar size, shape and position to ours. They appear to have been

made by a more primitive hominin than the creature that left the

Laetoli prints, but there's a problem: they also predate Ardipithecus by

about 1.3 million years. That means a human-like foot had evolved

much earlier than previously thought, throwing a spanner into the

accepted idea that the ape-footed Ardipithecus was a direct human

ancestor.
These footprints were fairly clearly dated to the Miocene period, about

5.7 million years ago. According to the researchers, they lie in a layer

of rock just below a distinctive layer that formed when the

Mediterranean sea dried out, about 5.6 million years ago. To further

back up the dating, the team analyzed the age of marine microfossils

from sections of rock above and below the prints.

But the age of the Trachilos tracks isn't the only mysterious feature

about them: where they were found is also key. Until recently, the

fossil record suggested that hominins originated in Africa and didn't

 expand into Europe and Asia until about 1.8 million years ago. But

these prints indicate that something with remarkably humanoid feet

was traipsing through Greece millions of years earlier than

conventional wisdom holds.

Interestingly, this find lines up with another recent discovery that

could rewrite human history. Back in May, a study described 7 million-

year-old bones of a hominin species called Graecopithecus

freybergi, which were discovered in Greece and Bulgaria. That find

represented such a huge discrepancy from the current thinking that

the researchers pondered whether it meant that the human and chimp

branches of the family tree originally split in Europe, and not Africa.

The new study might correlate that conclusion.

"This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human

evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate," says Per

Ahlberg, last author of the paper. "Whether the human origins

research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive

evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains

to be seen."

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the

Geologist's Association.

Source: Uppsala University

VIEW GALLERY - 2 IMAGES

TAGS

#APES
 #EUROPE
#EVOLUTION
#HUMAN
#UPPSALA UNIVERSITY

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