14 DAY TRIAL // On Thursday, scientists announced that 1.5 million years ago man's ancestors walked in very much the same way as we do now. The differences in stride are minimal, which means that the way we move at the present moment is, indeed, one of the most effective and energy-efficient in the world. The discovery that has made this conclusion possible is a footprint discovered near the city of Ileret, in the northern parts of Kenya, which has been perfectly conserved within sedimentary rock. It resembles a modern one, just like those people leave behind when walking on a wet sandy beach.
The find, made public in the February 27th issue of the journal Science by an international team of scientists, brings new insight into the evolution of the human body, from the stages it passed thorugh during all those past years. Even if other features, especially of the face, have changed over hundreds of thousands of years, the basic way in which we walk has not done so considerably. In other words, if we were to go back in time, we could see that our ancestor, Homo erectus, walked just like us, but looked a bit different.
“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. These could quite easily have been made on the beach today,” archaeologist David Braun has told Reuters in a telephone interview. The researcher is working for the University of Cape Town, in South Africa.
The most important clue that the conclusion of the study is correct is the fact that all the discovered prints, one of which most likely belongs to an infant, have the big toe parallel to the others, as opposed to the configuration it has in apes, where it's opposable. Also, all the toes are short, unlike those of apes, and the Arch of the foot hints at human origins as well. By analyzing the length of the stride and the depth of the tracks, researchers have concluded that the humans who made them must have been around 5-foot-9 in height, and had the average weight of modern-day people.