1.5 million-year old footprints made by Homo erectus males in Kenya may belong to a hunting party.
Roach and his team propose that the tracks represent group hunts for antelope or wildebeest. “What we can say is that we have a number of individuals, probably males, that are moving across a lake shore in a way that is consistent with how carnivores move,” he says. The researchers now plan to study the movement patterns of present-day subsistence hunters in Africa to get a better idea of what their footprints look like. “Hunting is a difficult thing to prove in human evolution,” Roach says. The presence of numerous adult males also points to some level of cooperation.
Story: Ewen Callaway, Nature | Photo: Brian Richmond, Nature
No comments:
Post a Comment