(ANSA) - Rome, June 15 - Italian and Eritrean researchers on Wednesday found the first footprints of 'homo erectus', a key predecessor of modern man. The footprints, left 800,000 years ago in the sand of a lake that is now part of an Eritrean desert, were found by palaeontologists from Rome's La Sapienza University and the National Museum of Eritrea, at the Aalad-Amo site in the east of the country. Dig coordinator Alfredo Coppa said the footprints would likely say a lot about a key species in the history of human evolution.
The footprints are very similar to those of modern man and could provide important information about our ancestors' foot anatomy and locomotion: they show details of the toes and the sole of the foot that made them efficient at walking and running. The footprints are aligned in a north-south direction the same as hoof prints left by extinct antelopes and are preserved in a sediment 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.
Italians find first footprints of homo erectus
In Eritrea