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New research suggests that fossilized footprints found in Tanzania in the 1970s and thought to have been made by bears for decades may have been left by an unidentified early human ancestor about 3.6 million years ago.

The footprints were discovered in 1976 near the site in Laetoli in northern Tanzania.Lucy“skeleton—this provided the first clear evidence that early humans walked on two legs.

The first set of prints was overshadowed. A paleoanthropologist’s suggestion that they might contain traces only dampened interest in the discovery, and the traces had hitherto been largely forgotten by archaeologists.

But a study based on a new analysis of these editions published in the journal nature Wednesday, indicates that it was made by an unidentified hominin or early human. The findings show that Lucy’s species Australopithecus afarensis was not the only hominin to walk the earth 3.6 million years ago.

“The upright gait is a defining feature of our lineage,” he said. Jeremy De Silva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth and senior author of the study. “It is a feature of being human. Even so, our understanding of the origins and evolution of bipedal movement is something we’re still trying to figure out.”

Ellison McNuttD., an assistant professor at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University and lead author of the study. Through his research on bears and their movements, he came across five partially excavated footprints in 1976 that he thought might help unravel the mystery of what prompted humans to walk on two legs.

The tracks, known as A-tracks, were unusually shaped, like a shorter and more robust version of a modern human’s footprint. They demonstrated a criss-cross gait movement, not unlike a model on a podium, where each foot crosses the midline of the body and touches the front of the other.

The ratio of the prints’ foot-width to length indicates that they were made by a different species than Lucy’s, which did not share an evolutionary trajectory with chimpanzees, the researchers said. The foot was wider than that of a typical early human, and the crosswalk pattern the prints showed could only occur if a species walked on two legs with the help of hips, the researchers said.

Researchers recorded almost 60 hours of video of wild American black bears. Unsupported bipedal stance and movement occurred only 0.09 percent of the time, they said. According to research, a bear has only once taken four unaided bipedal steps. The archaeologists concluded that this “likelied” the possibility that the fossilized tracks belonged to a bear.

Having multiple species of hominins living in the same time period, walking slightly differently with different foot sizes, “tells us that there is no single path to our evolution.” Dr.. said McNutt. “And it looks like the only road that still survives today is what we did.”

The work goes like this further research is difficult and changing understanding of how many early human species invaded the earth between three million and 3.7 million years ago, during what is known as the Pliocene Age, he said. Stephanie M. Melillo, a paleoanthropologist Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Dr. Melillo was not part of the study, but summarized his findings for Nature.

William Harcourt-SmithBoth footprints could have been made within days, said MD, an associate professor of anthropology at Lehman College and a resident research fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.

Not involved in the research, Dr. “The news about this find is that these are footprints that were made at almost the same time,” Harcourt-Smith said.

“This is the real deal,” he added. “If they are indeed hominins, they are the smoking gun of two different fossil hominins in the same landscape at the same time.”

But Tim D. WhiteA paleoanthropologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, Dr.

Found in the excavations of both footprints at Laetoli, Dr. White said that the difference between them is very small and not enough to definitively indicate the existence of another bipedal species. When footprints are made in volcanic ash, the prints in its deeper layers can deviate, become flatter or wider, changing their size and shape, he said.

Experts agreed that the new research disproved the original hypothesis that the A-track tracks were made by bears. Dr. There are no bears in the fossil record at Laetoli, White said.

The researchers said they plan to continue excavating the site in search of more footprints.