December
02
/ 2021
While exploring the Laetoli fossil site in the foothills of northern Tanzania in 1978, a team of anthropologists led by the renowned Mary Leakey discovered the oldest footprints of a human ancestor found anywhere in the fossil record. These tracks were estimated to be approximately 3.66 million years old and are believed to have been left by a member of an archaic hominin species known as Australopithecus afarensis, which shared characteristics with both ancient apes and modern humans. This was viewed as a landmark discovery, and rightly so. What no one realized at the time was that Leakey’s team had actually made their initial discovery of archaic human footprints two years earlier, at a site less than a mile (about
