21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Laetoli Footprints
team of paleoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey confirmed the bipedality of A. afarensis with another remarkable find in Tanzania: the famous “Laetoli footprints.” In 1976, Andrew Hill and another member of the team were taking a break by indulging in a favorite field pastime: pelting each other with chunks of dried elephant dung. Looking for ammunition in a dry stream bed, Hill stumbled upon a line of fossilized footprints. After careful excavation, the footprints turned out to be an ...Not only do these prints demonstrate A. afarensis could walk upright, but the nature of their preservation, having been made in volcanic ash and their proximity to one another, paints a image of two ancestors huddling together in an ashen landscape.