LEARNING to walk was a very personal challenge for our early ancestors. If the lurching gait of the pygmy chimpanzee is anything to go by, the pioneers of walking each found their own way of joining the pedestrian craze.
The earliest clear fossil evidence for upright walking comes from a set of footprints found at Laetoli in Tanzania that are 3.7 million years old. Two individuals, most likely Australopithecus afarensis, the same hominid species as the famous fossil Lucy, left 69 footprints—but no hand prints. But palaeontologists can only guess at Lucy’s gait, says Kris D’Aout at the University of…
