The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the Mediterranean island of Crete and are at least six million years old, says an international team of researchers from Germany, Sweden, Greece, Egypt and England, led by Tübingen scientists Uwe Kirscher and Madelaine Böhme of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen.
Using geophysical and micropaleontological methods, researchers have now dated them to 6.05 million years before the present day, making them the oldest direct evidence of a human-like foot used for walking.
The dating of the Cretan footprints therefore sheds new light on the early evolution of human perambulation more than six million years ago.
Six million years ago, Crete was connected to the Greek mainland via the Peloponnese.
According to Professor Madelaine Böhme, "We cannot rule out a connection between the producer of the tracks and the possible pre-human Graecopithecus freybergi." Several years ago, Böhme's team identified that previously unknown pre-human species in what is now Europe on the basis of fossils from 7.2 million-year-old deposits in Athens, just 250 kilometers away.
Recent research in paleoanthropology also suggested that the African ape Sahelanthropus could be ruled out as a biped, and that Orrorin tugenensis, which originated in Kenya and lived 6.1 to 5.8 million years ago, is the oldest pre-human in Africa, Böhme says.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-oldest-footprints-pre-humans-crete.html
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