Fill In the Blanks

The discovery of a set of what look like ancient hominin footprints on the island of Crete could throw our understanding of human evolution into disarray. Received wisdom is that after splitting from the chimp lineage, our hominin ancestors were confined to Africa until around 1.5 million years ago. The prints found in Crete, however, belonged to a creature that appears to have lived 5.7 million years ago – suggesting a more complex story. More research is needed to confirm what kind of animal made them. However, the prints seem to have been made by a creature that walked upright, on the soles of clawless feet (rather than on its toes), with a big toe positioned like our own, rather than sticking out sideways like an ape’s. It may yet turn out to have been a previously unknown non-hominin that had evolved with a human-like foot; but the explanatory paper, in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, is not the first to suggest that hominins could have originated in Europe. A few months ago, a team put forward evidence , gleaned from fossils found in Greece and Bulgaria, that a 7.2 million-year old ape known as Graecopithecus was in fact a hominin.