Koobi Fora

At Koobi Fora, Hatala’s team found the isolated footprints were made by two or three different individuals who each left footprints much like those of modern humans.

The footprints were discovered in 2021 by Richard Loki, a field and lab assistant at the Turkana Basin Institute, while he and others were excavating still-unpublished hominin fossils at the famed fossil site of Koobi Fora, near Lake Turkana in Kenya.

“This trackway is particularly beautifully preserved,” says paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey of Stony Brook University and director of the Koobi Fora Research Project.

She and her parents Meave and Richard Leakey have led teams over the past 50 years that have discovered five species of hominins at Koobi Fora, dating from 4.2 million to 1.4 million years ago.

A cut-marked bone from Koobi Fora, KenyaShara Bailey, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, says she wasn’t particularly surprised by the paper’s findings, because she and others have long suspected the “meat made us human” hypothesis was overly simplistic.