Department of Biology, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Science. 2024 Nov 29;386(6725):1004-1010. doi: 10.1126/science.ado5275. Epub 2024 Nov 28.
For much of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, multiple hominin species coexisted in the same regions of eastern and southern Africa. Due to the limitations of the skeletal fossil record, questions regarding their interspecific interactions remain unanswered. We report the discovery of footprints (~1.5 million years old) from Koobi Fora, Kenya, that provide the first evidence of two different patterns of Pleistocene hominin bipedalism appearing on the same footprint surface. New analyses show that this is observed repeatedly across multiple contemporaneous sites in the eastern Turkana Basin. These data indicate a sympatric relationship between and , suggesting that lake margin habitats were important to both species and highlighting the possible influence of varying levels of coexistence, competition, and niche partitioning in human evolution.
在上新世和更新世的大部分时间里,多种人类物种在非洲东部和南部的同一地区共存。由于骨骼化石记录的局限性,关于它们种间相互作用的问题仍然没有答案。我们报告了在肯尼亚的科比福拉发现的足迹(约 150 万年),这些足迹提供了第一个证据,证明在同一足迹表面上出现了两种不同的更新世人类两足动物行走模式。新的分析表明,这种情况在东图尔卡纳盆地的多个同期地点反复出现。这些数据表明 和 之间存在同域关系,这表明湖滨栖息地对这两个物种都很重要,并强调了共存、竞争和生态位分化的不同程度在人类进化中的可能影响。