These two ancient human relatives crossed paths 1.5 million years ago

Some 1.5 million years ago, two ancient species crossed paths on a lake shore in Kenya. Their footprints in the mud were frozen in time and lay undiscovered until 2021.

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Now, analysis of the impressions reveals that they belonged to Homo erectus, a forebear of modern humans, and the more distant relative Paranthropus boisei. The two individuals walked through the lake area within hours or days of each other — leaving the first direct record of different archaic hominin species coexisting in the same place.

“This is the first snapshot we have of those two species living on the same immediate landscape, potentially interacting with one another,” says study co-author Kevin Hatala, a palaeoanthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The study was published in Science on 28 November¹.

The prints preserved details about the individuals, including the height of their foot arches, the shape of their toes and their walking patterns.

“It really is a snapshot in time,” says Tracy Kivell,a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

“These fossilized footprints are as close as we are going to get to having a time machine to take us back to an eastern African lakeshore 1.5 million years ago,” says Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington DC.

Walking path