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Hominin footprints at Laetoli reveal a walk on the wild side

Bipedalism is a defining feature of the human lineage, but not all hominin species walked in the same way. New data from a famous palaeoanthropology site reveal that at least two differently bipedal hominins roamed eastern Africa.
  1. Stephanie M. Melillo

    1. Stephanie M. Melillo is in the Department of Human Evolution, Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.

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The human version of walking on two legs, known as striding bipedalism, is unique among mammals. It requires the ability to balance a tower of loosely connected body parts over a single foot, as the other foot swings forwards to complete the stride. Conventional wisdom holds that this ungainly form of locomotion had a single evolutionary origin in an ancestral hominin, followed by about six million years during which further anatomical adjustments accumulated — a linear model of evolution in which early hominin bipedalism became progressively more similar to our own over time. However, fossils discovered during the past decade show that multiple versions of bipedalism existed simultaneously during one or more periods of hominin evolution. Writing in Nature, McNutt et al.1 suggest that evidence of locomotor diversity in hominins has been overlooked for many decades.

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Nature 600, 388-390 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03469-4

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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