We had been working really hard that day and were heading back
toward camp when one of our team decided to liven things up by slinging elephant dung at
the rest of us. He aimed one at me, and I had to dive out of the way. I ended up flat on
my face. I started to rise and saw marks in the ground. I realized they were fossilized
raindrops. Then I looked around and saw ancient animal footprints all over the place. We
had passed over that ground so many times before that evening, but none of us had noticed
a thing. But once we saw the first prints, we could see them everywhere: fossilized tracks
of rhino, elephants, antelopes, all sorts of animals.
(Recollection of Andrew Hill, a paleontologist on Mary Leakey's team at
Laetoli, Tanzania in 1976. From McKie, Robin. Dawn of Man: The Story of Human
Evolution. [New York City: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc., 2000] pp.10-11)
As Leakey's team studied the Laetoli site over the next two years, more
prints were uncovered in the ash -- hominid
footprints that looked incredibly similar to those that people today make as they walk
barefoot along a beach. But, these tracks were at least 3.6 million years old. It was the
first time paleontologists had actually found behavioral evidence of bipedalism in early
hominids. As Ian Tattersall, curator of physical anthropology at the American Museum of
Natural History, has said, "Usually behavior has to be inferred indirectly from the
evidence of bones and teeth, and there is almost always argument over inferences of this
kind. But at Laetoli, through these footprints, behavior itself is fossilized."
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Watch the Evolution Library video segment
"Laetoli Footprints." For more information on the Laetoli footprints, look at
this page from A Science Odyssey Web site. Then think about these
questions:
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What characteristics of the footprints distinguished them
from chimps' footprints? |
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How might the age of the Laeotoli footprints be
determined? |
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