More than a million years ago, on a hot savannah teeming with wildlife near the shore of what would someday become Lake Turkana in Kenya, two completely different species of hominins may have passed each other as they scavenged for food.
Scientists know this because they have examined 1.5-million-year-old fossils they unearthed and have concluded they represent the first example of two sets of hominin footprints made about the same time on an ancient lake shore. The discovery will provide more insight into human evolution and how species cooperated and competed with one another, the scientists said.
"Hominin" is a newer term that describes a subdivision of the larger category known as hominids. Hominins includes all organisms, extinct and alive, considered to be within the human lineage that emerged after the split from the ancestors of the great apes. This is believed to have occurred about 6 million to 7 million years ago.
The discovery, published in Science offers hard proof that different hominin species lived contemporaneously in time and space, overlapping as they evaded predators and weathered the challenges of safely securing food in the ancient African landscape. Hominins belonging to the species Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, the two most common living human species of the Pleistocene Epoch, made the tracks, the researchers said.
"Their presence on the same surface, made closely together in time, places the two species at the lake margin, using the same habitat."
Craig Feibel - Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Department of Anthropology, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
Scientists know this because they have examined 1.5-million-year-old fossils they unearthed and have concluded they represent the first example of two sets of hominin footprints made about the same time on an ancient lake shore. The discovery will provide more insight into human evolution and how species cooperated and competed with one another, the scientists said.
"Hominin" is a newer term that describes a subdivision of the larger category known as hominids. Hominins includes all organisms, extinct and alive, considered to be within the human lineage that emerged after the split from the ancestors of the great apes. This is believed to have occurred about 6 million to 7 million years ago.
The discovery, published in Science offers hard proof that different hominin species lived contemporaneously in time and space, overlapping as they evaded predators and weathered the challenges of safely securing food in the ancient African landscape. Hominins belonging to the species Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, the two most common living human species of the Pleistocene Epoch, made the tracks, the researchers said.
"Their presence on the same surface, made closely together in time, places the two species at the lake margin, using the same habitat."
Craig Feibel - Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Department of Anthropology, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
