In what may help rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists claim to have found evidence that our ancestors abandoned the trees three million years ago to walk upright like modern people. An international team has found a fossilised foot bone from an early human relative who strolled confidently on two legs more than 3.2
million years ago, a findings which it claims ends decades of debate about when our ancestors first began to walk like modern man, the Daily Mail reported.
The bone belonged to Australopithecus afarensis — a creature best known from the discovery of “Lucy”, whose partial skeleton was dug up in Ethiopia in 1974. The fossil shows that Lucy’s feet had fixed arches, a trait only found in humans and which evolve to cope with the strains of running and walking long distances.
“Now that we know Lucy and her relatives had arches in their feet, this affects much of we know about them, from where they lived to what they ate and how they avoided predators,” said Prof. Carol Ward of University of Missouri, who led the study.
“The development of arched feet was a fundamental shift toward the human condition, because it meant giving up ability to use the big toe for grasping branches, signalling that our ancestors had finally abandoned life in the trees in favour of life on the ground,” Prof. Carol Ward of University of Missouri added.
Lucy had a smaller brain and stronger jaw than a modern person. Her species lived between 3.7 million and 2.9 million years ago and known to be able to walk on two feet. —PTI