In Tanzania, next to fingerprints attributed to congeners of Australopitheque Lucy, steps left in ash are interpreted as those of an unknown prehuman primate species.
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Bear in Africa? In the Atlas, there were very recently, and fossils of 5 million years old were exhumed in particular in Langebaanweg’s career, South Africa. But were they present in Tanzania, there are 3.66 million years ago, sharing the territory of Australopithecèque Lucy and its congeners? The hypothesis, mentioned in the 1970s, to explain enigmatic traces of a fossilized step found on the site of Laetoli, “drawn a little by the hair of the bear”, according to the paleontologist Yves Coppens, may be of die of his beautiful death.
It has indeed been reviewed by a vast international team, returned in 2019 on the premises to make new surveys of the “Track A” which has kept the suspected footprints, covered In the late 1970s to protect them from erosion and passage of livestock. In the Journal Nature of December 2, Ellison McNutt (University of Southern California in Los Angeles) and his colleagues argue that these traces may have been left there by an indeterminate species of homininé, distinct from the australopithecs already identified in the region.
The Laetoli site is well known in the middle of paleontology for its rich fossil richness – it has been explored in the 1930s by the pioneer of African excavations Louis Leakey. This is discovered by his wife Mary, in 1974, a mandible baptized LH 4 (for Laetoli hominid 4) that will serve as a specimen to define the austalopithecus afarensis species, to which the famous Lucy belongs.
Challer approach
It is also that in 1976, according to the legend, the paleontologist Andrew Hill was literally found his nose on footsteps of footsteps, while he had just stumbled by trying to avoid a duck d Elephant that a colleague had pleasantly thrown him. No less than 18,400 animal traces were to be unveiled, printed in three dimensions in volcanic ash and protected by successive eruptions, there are 3.66 million years ago. Among them, the Mary Leakey team identifies five fingerprints that are the brand according to her from the passage of a biped homininé, to the motoring approach: the successive traces seemed to pass from the opposite side of the axis of movement of the displacement. ‘individual – “A bit like these models that cross their steps during fashion shows”, describes Yves Coppens.
The French, who went to Laetoli for the first time in 1963, remembers the jokes with his colleagues about this enigmatic approach. “The British said it was an australopithèque passed to hook the paleontologists, and we spoke rather of an early invention of wine …” But two years later, in 1978, the discovery of new footprints less equivocal, Clearly bipedes and attributed to A. Afarensis, those of the “Trail G”, eclipses the first. The hypothesis of the passage on the “track has” of a bear on his rear legs then takes shape. A feet foot footprint corresponding little or prou to that of the left foot of a homininée, more need to explain the strange crossing of the steps along the line of progress. No matter if there is no fossil bear in Laetoli, Agriotherium Africanum discovered at the same time in South Africa, even if he is older, will do the trick, without totally carrying membership. And then, the time passing, as the writing nicely Stephanie Melillo (Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology of Leipzig), in a comment in nature, “the footprints of the” track A “were more easily forgotten than explained” .
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