800,000-Year-Old Footprints Of Homo Erectus Discovered In Eritrea

MessageToEagle.com – Researchers have discovered 800,000-year-old footprints of Homo Erectus, predecessor of modern man.

The footprints were found in the sand of a lake that is now part of an Eritrean desert.

Homo Erectus arose at least 1.8 million years ago.

Compared with modern Homo sapiens, which have only been around for the last 200,000 years, Homo erectus, or “upright man,” was present on our planet much longer.

The ancient ancestor of modern humans lived from 2 million years ago till about 100,000 years ago, possibly even 50,000 years ago.

Fossils of Homo erectus also show that the species lived in numerous locales across the globe, including South Africa, Kenya, Spain, China, and Java (Indonesia).

According to palaeontologists from Rome’s La Sapienza University and the National Museum of Eritre who discovered the 800,00-year old footprints of Homo Erectus, the finding, can provide us with provide important information about our ancestors’ foot anatomy and locomotion.

The footprints are very similar to those of modern man and show details of the toes and the sole of the foot that made them efficient at walking and running.

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The footprints are aligned in a north-south direction the same as hoof prints left by extinct antelopes and are preserved in asediment of hardened sand, probably exposed to flooding.

This suggests that the area was a lake surrounded by savannah. The discovery is the first time that footprints from the mid-Pleistocene era have been found, a very important period of transition in human evolution, in which human species with larger brains and more modern bodies than homo erectus developed.

Footprints dating back 800,000 years have also been discovered in Norfolk, United Kingdom. Scientists believe the prints, which were probably made by five different people, are direct evidence of the earliest known humans in northern Europe.

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