Hellooooo….. 1.5 million year old Footprint found in KENYA

Meet Lucy - she’s the start of so many wonderful things that happened today. So Many Wonderful Things Today -

Stevie Wonder is Honored by the President, for his contributions.

The Kenyans can now clearly prove that life did begin in the Oduvuai Gorge Indeed..

Hopefully this will end the argument over who came first the Chicken or the Egg. it is obvious – the Kenyans.

lets chalk another one up in the Go Obama Column (just kidding)

Here’s a lil bit about Lucy,

Lucy (also given a second (Amharic) name: dinqineš, or “Dinkenesh,” meaning “You are beautiful” or “you are wonderful”^[3]) is the common name of AL 288-1, the 40% complete skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis specimen discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia‘s Afar Depression.

Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago^[1]. The discovery of this hominin was significant as the skeleton shows evidence of small skull capacity akin to that of apes and of bipedal upright walk akin to that of humans, providing further evidence that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size in human evolution.^[4]^[5]

She’s On Tour of the US -

US tour

A six-year exhibition tour of the United States, titled Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia features the Lucy fossil as well as over 100 artifacts from ancient times to the present, is currently underway. The tour was approved by the Ethiopian government and organized in collaboration with the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where it had been on display from August 31, 2007 until September 1, 2008.^[16] An undisclosed proportion of the proceeds from the tour is to go toward modernizing Ethiopia’s museums.^[17] The U.S. Department of State also approved the tour. There was controversy in advance of the tour over concerns about the fragility of the specimens, with various experts including paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy and anthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey publicly stating their opposition.

The Smithsonian Institution and Cleveland Museum of Natural History were among museums declining to host the exhibits.^[18] The fossil’s discoverer Don Johanson stated that although he was somewhat uneasy about the possibility of damage, he did not oppose exhibiting Lucy as it will help to raise awareness of human-origins studies. The museum is making arrangements for the exhibits to be shown at as many as ten other museums.

The exhibit is currently being shown at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington where it will be displayed from October 4, 2008 – March 8, 2009.^[17] In September 2008, between the exhibits in Houston and Seattle, the fossils were taken to the University of Texas at Austin for 10 days to complete the first ever high resolution CT scan of the fossil.^[19]

Earliest ‘human footprints’ found

Laser scanning was used to plot the exact dimensions of the prints

The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya.

The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints.

The size and spacing of the Kenyan markings – attributed to Homo erectus – reflect the height, weight, and walking style of modern humans.

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

The footprints are not the oldest belonging to a member of the human lineage. That title belongs to the 3.7 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis prints found in Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1978.

Those prints, however, showed comparatively flat feet and a significantly higher angle between the big toe and the other toes, representative of a foot still adapted to grasping.

Exactly how that more ape-like foot developed into its modern version has remained unclear.

The fossil record is distinctly lacking in foot and hand bones, according to lead author Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University, UK.

“The reason is that carnivores like to eat hands and feet,” Professor Bennett told BBC News.

“Once the flesh is gone there’s a lot of little bones that don’t get preserved, so we know very little about the evolution of hands and feet on our ancestors.”

The footprints were found near Ileret in northern Kenya. The site, on a small hill, is made up of metres of sediment which the researchers carefully cleared away.

What they found was two sets of footprints, one five metres deeper than the other, separated by sand, silt, and volcanic ash.

The team dated the surrounding sediment by comparing it with well-known radioisotope-dated samples from the region, finding that the two layers of prints were made at least 10,000 years apart.

Another critical feature that the series of footprints makes clear is how Homo erectus walked.

There is evidence of a heavy landing on the heel with weight transferred along the outer edge of the foot, progressing to the ball of the foot and lifting off with the toes.

“That’s very diagnostic of the modern style of walking, and the Laetoli prints don’t give that same character,” Professor Bennett said.

The finding is a critical clue for mapping out the evolution of modern humans, both in terms of physiology and also how H. erectus fared in its environment.

H. erectus was a great leap in evolution, showing increased variety of diet and of habitat, and was the first Homo species to make the journey out of Africa.

“There’s some suggestion out there that Homo erectus was able to scour the landscape for carcasses and meat…and was able to get there very quickly, had longer limbs and was much more efficient in terms of long distance travel,” Professor Bennett added.

“Now we’re also saying it had an essentially modern foot anatomy and function, which also adds to that story.”