One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.
At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.
As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.
Personal recollection:The tracks also challenge earlier reconstructions of P. boisei as substantially smaller than H. erectus. Estimates derived from the prints suggest that the largest individuals may have stood about 1.8 metres tall and weighed around 75 kilograms—well within the size range of modern humans. Because most of the known fossils of P. boisei are teeth, jaws and skull fragments, footprints provide valuable evidence about a body for which relatively few bones from below the neck have been found.
As I relate in by autobiographical book, In The Blink Of An Eye: Growing Up In Rural Oxfordshire, one of my enduring regrets was in not meeting Louis Leakey when he came to Fawler to show his find to Professor Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, president of the Royal Society and leading evolutionary palaeoanthropologist of his day, who incidentally was one of the team who proved Piltdown was a hoax.
Sir Wilfred and his wife were friends of mine when, as a young teenager, I had impressed them with my interest in nature and had been given access to their extensive library. I also delivered their Sunday newspaper. One Sunday, when I delivered their newspaper, Lady Le Gros Clarke invited me to come in and meet someone who was staying with them who had something I might like to see. However, as was normal for us village children in the late 1950s, I was wearing my rubber wellington boots, or 'wellies', and an absolute house rule was shoes off at the door. In my wellies my feet were especially malodorous, so I made an excuse, mumbling something about being late, and left.
Had I accepted the invitation I would have been one of the first people outside Africa to see the fossil of 'Zinjanthropus'.
Perhaps most intriguingly, several large individuals apparently crossed the surface at approximately the same time. If the footprints have been identified correctly, they show that several adult male P. boisei tolerated one another and possibly travelled together. Whether this was a foraging party, a temporary male coalition or part of some other social arrangement cannot be known, but the trackway preserves a rare glimpse of behaviour rather than merely anatomy. Across the wider East Turkana region, hundreds of tracks indicate that different hominin species repeatedly used these lakeshore environments for more than 100,000 years. In the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology news release accompanying the paper in PNAS the sites are described as a developing “photo album” of Early Pleistocene hominin life.
For creationists, however, the most awkward measurement is not the trackmakers’ height, weight or stride length, but their age. These individuals walked beside an African lake approximately 1.4 million years ago—roughly two hundred times earlier than the date at which many biblical literalists claim that their god created the first two humans and all other terrestrial life. They belonged to one of several hominin species then sharing the African landscape, each with its own evolutionary history, anatomy and way of life.
Paranthropus boisei^ An Evolutionary Cousin Living Alongside Early Humans. Paranthropus boisei was an extinct East African hominin that lived from approximately 2.3 million to 1.2 million years ago. Its fossils have been found in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. It belonged to a side branch of hominin evolution and is not generally regarded as a direct ancestor of modern humans.
The species became widely known following Mary Leakey’s discovery in 1959 of the remarkably complete OH 5 skull at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Louis Leakey originally named it Zinjanthropus boisei, and the specimen is still popularly known as “Zinj”. It was later transferred to the genus Paranthropus, although some researchers have classified it as Australopithecus boisei.
Built for powerful chewing
P. boisei had an unusually broad, dish-shaped face, enormous cheek teeth, extremely thick dental enamel and widely flaring cheekbones that provided space for massive chewing muscles. In adult males, some of these muscles were anchored to a prominent sagittal crest along the top of the skull. The description “robust” refers primarily to this specialised chewing apparatus, not necessarily to the size or strength of the rest of the body.
These features earned it the nickname “Nutcracker Man”, but the name is probably misleading. Microscopic wear on its teeth does not suggest that it habitually cracked hard nuts. Carbon-isotope evidence indicates that much of its diet came from C4 plants, most probably grasses, sedges or their underground parts. Its formidable jaws may have enabled it to process large quantities of fibrous vegetation or to exploit especially tough fallback foods when preferred foods were scarce.
P. boisei walked habitually on two legs, although its foot anatomy and walking mechanics differed somewhat from those of Homo erectus and modern humans. Recently described hand fossils indicate a powerful grip and some capacity for human-like manipulation. It may therefore have been capable of using or even making tools, but stone tools found in deposits containing P. boisei cannot automatically be attributed to it because species of Homo occupied the same landscapes.
How do we know that other hominins lived alongside it?
Overlapping fossil ranges: Fossils show that P. boisei, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus were all present in the Turkana Basin between about 2.0 million and 1.5 million years ago. Similar overlap occurred at Olduvai Gorge. Human evolution during this period was therefore not a sequence in which one species neatly replaced another.
Fossils in the same deposits: At Koobi Fora, the P. boisei skull KNM-ER 406 and the H. erectus skull KNM-ER 3733 were recovered from the same stratigraphic interval. This confirmed that two very different hominin lineages occupied the region during the same geological period. Deposits can, however, accumulate over many years, so such fossils do not show that the individuals met or even lived there at precisely the same moment.
Footprints on the same surface: In 2024, researchers described approximately 1.5-million-year-old footprints from Koobi Fora displaying two distinct forms of bipedal locomotion. One trackway was attributed to P. boisei, while more human-like prints were attributed to H. erectus. Because the prints were preserved on the same short-lived lakeshore surface, they were probably made within hours or days of one another. This is much more immediate evidence than bones occurring in the same geological formation: the two species used the same habitat at essentially the same time.
The attribution of footprints to particular species remains an informed inference based on their shape, biomechanics and the hominins known from the surrounding deposits; footprints do not carry the name of their maker. Nevertheless, the existence of two consistently different footprint patterns provides strong evidence for two kinds of bipedal hominin sharing the Lake Turkana landscape.
The newly analysed GaJi10 surface adds another scene to this picture. Its 21 footprints indicate that eight probable P. boisei individuals crossed a lakeshore approximately 1.43 million years ago, perhaps as a mostly male group. Taken together with other East Turkana track sites, the evidence shows that Paranthropus and Homo repeatedly inhabited the same lake-margin environments over more than 100,000 years.
We cannot tell whether the two lineages cooperated, avoided one another or competed for particular resources. Their different teeth, diets and locomotor anatomy suggest some ecological separation that may have reduced direct competition. What the evidence does show is a branching evolutionary landscape populated by several contemporaneous hominins—not a single-file progression towards modern humanity, and certainly not the sudden appearance of one divinely created human couple.
There was no first man fashioned instantaneously from dust, no first woman manufactured from his rib and no human couple beginning our species only a few thousand years ago. Instead, there were evolving populations and branching lineages, including evolutionary cousins such as Paranthropus that flourished for hundreds of thousands of years before becoming extinct. Their feet left impressions in the mud long before the biblical authors imagined the creation story—and the rocks have preserved those impressions with considerably greater fidelity than mythology preserved the truth about human origins.
Fossil footprints reveal body size and group dynamics of 1.4-million-year-old human relative
New study provides a rare snapshot of “fossil behavior” from Paranthropus boisei, an ancient hominin group in northern Kenya.
To the point
- A snapshot of ancient behavior: Fossil footprints from northern Kenya preserve evidence of eight Paranthropus boisei individuals moving together along a lakeshore around 1.4 million years ago.
- Unexpectedly large body size: The footprints indicate human-like body sizes — up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms — larger than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.
- Insights into group dynamics: The tracks suggest that mostly adult male individuals traveled together, hinting at a complex social structure in this extinct human relative.
- Lake margins as key habitats: Hundreds of hominin footprints from the East Turkana region show that ancient human relatives repeatedly used lakeshore environments over more than 100,000 years.
A new study documents a set of fossil footprints preserving a snapshot of “fossil behavior” from an ancient hominin group along a lakeshore in northern Kenya around 1.4 million years ago.
An international team of researchers from the US and Kenya found tracks showing eight Paranthropus boisei individuals — an extinct “cousin” of modern humans — in one place at one time. All of the individuals are thought to be adults, and some appear to have been much larger in body size than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.
Large footprints, large bodies
Analytical methods that this research team pioneered in 2024 helped distinguish these new tracks as belonging to Paranthropus boisei, based on their apparent foot anatomy and movement patterns. However, their sizes were surprising.
Kevin Hatala and colleagues discuss the ancient footprints excavated in northern Kenya in 2023.© Kay Behrensmeyer.
The sizes of the footprints indicate human-like body sizes – up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms.
Kevin G. Hatala, lead author
Department of Biology
Chatham University
Pittsburgh, PA. USA.
Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Paranthropus boisei fossils were skulls with massive jaws and teeth, and little has been known about their anatomy from the neck down. But these latest findings challenge earlier studies that suggested Paranthropus boisei was considerably smaller than the contemporary Homo erectus, which is a possible direct ancestor of modern humans.
Fossil footprint surfaces are known to form very quickly and therefore can also be a useful window into hominin behavior and group dynamics.
The fact that eight, mostly adult male, Paranthropus boisei individuals seemingly traveled together as a group, without females or children, hints at a complex social structure in this species. They may have lived in large groups, where males competed for mates, but also tolerated each other at times for safety in a dangerous environment.
Neil T. Roach, co-author
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA. USA.
This discovery adds an important behavioral dimension to the fossil record of Paranthropus boisei, a species that lived alongside early members of the genus Homo, yet took a different evolutionary path.
Returning to the lake shore
A growing assemblage of ancient human footprints in lake margin environments also points toward this being an important habitat with critical resources for our extinct relatives.To me, it is amazing that we have the same kind of lake margin deposits in two areas of East Turkana that are 40 kilometers apart, at about the same age.
Anna Kay Behrensmeyer, co-author.
Department of Paleobiology and Human Origins Program
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC. USA.
At this point, the research team has documented hundreds of hominin footprints across more than a half-dozen sites in this region. Behrensmeyer predicts that,… if we can understand what geological conditions allowed these tracks to be preserved, we should know more about why hominins continued to return to the lake shore environment over more than 100,000 years.
Anna Kay Behrensmeyer.
Building a photo album of the past
The team will be back in Kenya this year to continue research into these special fossil footprint sites.
Each site represents a snapshot of our past, and we are quickly building a photo album with several different windows to hominin anatomy, locomotion, behavior, and environments during the Early Pleistocene.
Kevin G. Hatal.
Co-author Purity Kiura of the National Museums of Kenya adds:The discovery of these fossil footprints along the margins of Lake Turkana reinforces the region's global importance in understanding human evolution, preserving remarkable evidence of how our ancient relatives lived 1.4 million years ago. It further strengthens Kenya's position as one of the world's leading paleoanthropological landscapes and highlights our responsibility to protect this irreplaceable heritage.
Purity Kiura, co-author.
Department of Earth Sciences
National Museums of Kenya
Nairobi, Kenya.
Combining new analytical approaches with exceptional fossil footprint sites, the study demonstrates that ancient tracks can reveal the anatomy and movement of extinct human relatives, while also providing rare insights into their social lives and environments.
Publication:
These footprints are more than curiosities impressed in ancient mud. They preserve a brief moment in the lives of several individuals belonging to an extinct branch of the hominin family tree: where they walked, how they moved, how large they may have been and, tentatively, something about how they associated with one another. Although their attribution to Paranthropus boisei remains an evidence-based inference, their existence and great age are not dependent upon mythology or doctrinal interpretation.
The wider evidence from East Turkana is even more revealing. P. boisei shared this landscape with Homo erectus and, earlier, with other members of the genus Homo. Different hominin lineages lived concurrently, exploited some of the same habitats and followed separate evolutionary trajectories. Human evolution was not a ladder leading inevitably towards us, still less a single act in which one ancestral couple appeared fully formed. It was a branching, untidy process in which populations diversified, coexisted and sometimes became extinct.
Nor did the researchers need to suspend or replace evolutionary theory to interpret their discovery. Evolution supplied the framework within which differences in foot anatomy, locomotion, body size, diet and ecological specialisation could be compared. The study refines what scientists know about one extinct lineage and leaves testable questions open—precisely how science progresses. Uncertainty about the trackmakers’ species or social organisation is not evidence for creation; it is an invitation to find and analyse more evidence.
For creationists, however, the fundamental problem remains immovable. These hominins crossed a Kenyan lakeshore about 1.43 million years ago, more than a hundred times before the date at which biblical literalists place the creation of the world and its first humans. Their footprints join the fossils, sediments, volcanic deposits and stone tools in recording an immense history of hominin evolution for which Genesis has no place. The mud recorded what happened; the biblical authors, writing nearly one and a half million years later, simply knew nothing about it.
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