Footprints in Kenya shed light on prehistoric human cousin Paranthropus

Footprints left on a muddy lakeshore in northern Kenya ⁠around 1.43 million years ago are providing new insight into the size and behaviour of a species in the human evolutionary lineage that was the last of its kind, known for extensive anatomical adaptations for eating tough vegetation.

The species, Paranthropus boisei, is known mostly from skull and tooth fossils. Now researchers working along the eastern side of Kenya’s Lake Turkana have identified 21 footprints made by eight individuals of this species who appear to have been walking together on a mudflat. They attributed the tracks to this species based on ‌foot shape and gait, and concluded they probably were left by adult males, due to their size.

The footprints provide a glimpse into social dynamics in Paranthropus boisei, including the fact that males sometimes travelled across the landscape in groups, without females or children.

Species in the human evolutionary lineage are called hominins.

“In all, this is another amazing snapshot that gives us insights into how these hominins looked, how they walked and how they engaged with each other and with their environments,” said palaeoanthropologist Kevin Hatala of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Footprints slightly older than these, described in a study published in 2024, showed that Paranthropus boisei inhabited this region alongside another hominin, ⁠called Homo erectus, that was more closely related to our species – perhaps a direct ancestor.