In the Footprints of Our Ancestors: An Overview of the Hominid Track Record

Palaeoecology of giraffe tracks in Late Pleistocene aeolianites on the Cape south coast

“…Pliocene giraffid tracks recorded at Laetoli (3660 ka) 28 had dimensions of 17 cm x 12.5 cm 29 . Holocene giraffe tracks, thought to be hundreds of years old, were recorded from the Kuiseb Delta in Namibia.…”

Ichnotaxonomy of the Laetoli trackways: The earliest hominin footprints

“…The advantage to naming ichnotaxa is that within the parataxonomy they can be referred to unambiguously based on morphology (the basis of the parataxon) without having to make a definite statement as to the tracemaker's identity, which is usually not known or debateable (e.g., Bertling et al, 2006). Impetus for naming the Laetoli hominin tracks arises in part from growing interest in hominin tracks (e.g., D'Aout et al, 2010;Raichlen et al, 2010;Bennett et al, 2009;Kim et al, 2008a;Lockley et al, 2007Lockley et al, , 2008Meldrum, 2004aMeldrum, ,b, 2007a and the recognition that none had ever been formally named, until Kim et al (2008b) proposed the name Hominipes modernus, for well-preserved tracks unequivocally attributed to Homo sapiens. That ichnotaxon is based on the type footprints at the Acahualinca Footprint Museum, Managua, Nicaragua (Lockley et al, 2008).…”

“…Impetus for naming the Laetoli hominin tracks arises in part from growing interest in hominin tracks (e.g., D'Aout et al, 2010;Raichlen et al, 2010;Bennett et al, 2009;Kim et al, 2008a;Lockley et al, 2007Lockley et al, , 2008Meldrum, 2004aMeldrum, ,b, 2007a and the recognition that none had ever been formally named, until Kim et al (2008b) proposed the name Hominipes modernus, for well-preserved tracks unequivocally attributed to Homo sapiens. That ichnotaxon is based on the type footprints at the Acahualinca Footprint Museum, Managua, Nicaragua (Lockley et al, 2008). There is no systematic reason to exempt fossil hominin footprints from the same ICZN-approved methods of ichnotaxonomic scrutiny applied to other mammal and tetrapod footprints from the fossil record.…”

“…We argue that this is the case for the Laetoli footprints and that naming them brings them into a growing parataxonomy of Cenozoic mammal footprints (McDonald et al, 2007), in particular hominin footprints (Lockley et al, , 2008, and allows their distinctive morphology to be readily recognized and systematically evaluated.…”

Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?

“…Scale bars, 5 cm. like characteristics, particularly the anterior placement of the first digit, would reflect an example of convergent evolution, a familiar phenomenon in the fossil record (Emery and Clayton, 2004;Lockley et al, 2008;Parker et al, 2013). Fossil apes are not uncommon in the Miocene of Europe and there is a considerable diversity of forms, ranging biostratigraphically from the early middle Miocene to the late Miocene (middle Turolian; Harrison, 2010;Sénut, 2010;Spassov et al, 2012;Böhme et al, 2017).…”