May, 02, 2000Ancient footprints show early man walked the walk.
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February 26, 2009 11:23 PM
“It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site,” archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
“These could quite easily have been made on the beach today,” Braun added.
The footprints show that the individuals had a big toe parallel to the other toes, unlike that of other apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a characteristic human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance.