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

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated. A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.  

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Credit: © Kay Behrensmeyer

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. “The sizes of the footprints indicate human-like body sizes – up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms”, says lead author Kevin Hatala, of Chatham University and an associated researcher of the Department of Human Origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

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”, says co-author Neil Roach of Harvard University. “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.”

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”, says co-author Kay Behrensmeyer of the Smithsonian Institution.

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.”

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,” says Hatala.

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.”

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.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2530996123 

Unravelling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Stockholm University

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The Eastern Mediterranean dried as part of a broader climate transition; weakening monsoons and shifting atmospheric circulation reduced moisture from Africa and rainfall across the region. Image: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

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Credit: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.

“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the drought associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe”, says Katherine Power, PhD student, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, and first author of the study.

Around 3,200 years ago, many of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Hittite Empire, experienced widespread societal collapse. Although severe droughts have long been linked to this period, the climatic processes behind these events remain uncertain. To investigate this, Katherine Power and Qiong Zhang, professor in paleoclimate modelling, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University and co-author of the study, used a state-of-the-art climate model to reconstruct the evolution of the Mediterranean climate over the past 8,000 years.

“Our results show that the region underwent a gradual drying trend over thousands of years, driven by slow changes in Earth’s orbit. Superimposed on this long-term trend we also found shorter-term fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere”, says Katherine Power.

The researchers found that most severe droughts occurred when several natural climate cycles aligned, temporarily reinforcing one another and producing droughts far more intense than the long-term drying trend alone.

“The convergence of these processes pushed the Eastern Mediterranean beyond a critical hydroclimatic threshold, reducing water availability and increasing pressure on agriculture and food security within already vulnerable societies”, Katherine Power says.

These findings change how we think about past droughts, the researcher say, and understanding these processes is highly relevant today:

“The Mediterranean is one of the world’s climate change hotspots and the area is projected to become warmer and drier during the coming century. Our findings suggest that future drought risk may depend not only on long-term human-driven warming, but also on how natural variability in the Atlantic Ocean interacts with that background trend”, Katherine Power explains.

By revealing how different climate processes combine to amplify drought, this research can provide new insights into the risks of future hydroclimatic extremes in a warming world, the researchers say. 

The study “Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse” was published in Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed5439.
For this research the model EC-Earth was used.
 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aed5439 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse

Ceramic vessels reveal how social inequalities were also cooked into 19th-century Brazil

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

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The study analysed the lipids preserved in more than 180 ceramic fragments and the proteins present in a selection of these pieces.

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Credit: ICTA-UAB

Fish, shellfish, maize, manioc, rice and even chicken eggs. Molecular residues preserved in more than 180 ceramic vessels from southern Brazil have made it possible to reconstruct what different communities were cooking more than a century ago, showing that access to food varied according to the origin and social status of their inhabitants.

An international study led by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) reveals that Indigenous, African and Afro-descendant communities relied more heavily on marine resources, while communities of immigrants from Germany consumed mainly plant species and terrestrial products.

Brazil is a multicultural and ethnically diverse country whose history has been shaped by the interaction between Indigenous peoples, African populations, Luso-Brazilian communities and, later, European immigrant communities. However, little is known about how this cultural diversity was reflected in people's everyday diet. The research has reconstructed part of this history by analysing food residues preserved in ceramics used between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Babitonga Bay, southern Brazil.

The study, recently published in Royal Society Open Science, analysed the lipids preserved in more than 180 ceramic fragments and the proteins present in a selection of these pieces. Thanks to molecular archaeology techniques, the researchers were able to identify the types of food that were cooked or stored in the vessels used by Indigenous, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-descendant communities, and the first German immigrants established in the region.

The results show clear differences between the communities. Hand-modelled vessels, associated with Indigenous, Afro-descendant and Luso-Brazilian communities, show a greater presence of marine resources, such as fish and shellfish, as well as maize. In contrast, wheel-thrown ceramics, used mainly by German immigrants, show a greater presence of crops and terrestrial products, including meat and, in some cases, dairy products.

The molecular analysis made it possible to go one step further and identify specific foods cooked more than a century ago. These include fish from the Sciaenidae family, chicken egg and biomarkers compatible with the processing of maize, rice, manioc, beans, fruits and vegetables, and animal fats. According to the researchers, this combination of lipid and protein analyses provides a more accurate picture of the everyday diet of the different communities that lived around Babitonga Bay.

"The residues preserved in these ceramics show that everyday diet reflected the profound social and cultural differences that characterised Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. Molecular archaeology allows us to recover part of this history that is unlikely to appear in written documents," explains André Colonese, ICTA-UAB researcher and co-author of the study, which was carried out as part of the ERC Tradition project.

According to the researchers, the differences observed are not explained solely by culinary preferences, but also by unequal access to food. While livestock and certain crops were more closely linked to private property and an expanding market economy, fishing and the exploitation of coastal resources provided a more accessible source of food for communities with fewer resources. The results suggest that these foods played a fundamental role in ensuring the subsistence of many households in a context marked by significant social inequalities.

In addition to reconstructing the diet of these populations, the study demonstrates the potential of biomolecular archaeology to understand how economic, social and cultural changes transformed everyday diet. The authors believe that many of the differences dating back more than a century help explain the culinary diversity that characterises Brazil today.

 

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Journal

Royal Society Open Science

DOI

10.1098/rsos.260385 

Silkworm cultivation predated the Silk Road in southern Central Asia

 

Silk production skills reached Central Asia as early as 4,000 years ago, long before start of Silk Road trading route, WashU research finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Washington University in St. Louis

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By Talia Ogliore

The silkworm moth, whose caterpillars have been used in silk production since antiquity, may have been brought to southern Central Asia 4,000 years ago — nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously assumed — according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The discovery of three well-preserved cocoons at an archaeological site in Uzbekistan pushes back the earliest verified date for silkworms cultivated outside of China.

Up until now, it was generally accepted that silk products and their accompanying knowledge spread from ancient China to Central Asia and beyond within the context of the Silk Road, the famed route used by traders during the Roman and Han period. While many goods including spices, teas, porcelain and glassware were traded along this route, silk was the most coveted luxury item exported from China to the Roman Empire, giving the expansive route its iconic name.

The new archaeological evidence opens up the possibility of an earlier dispersal of silk and sericulture, according to Xinyi Liu, a professor of archaeology in WashU Arts & Sciences, corresponding author of a study in the journal Science Advances.

“This is the oldest reliable archaeological record of preserved silkworm cocoons with direct radiocarbon dates,” Liu said. “Even in China, where the silkworm moth was domesticated, we don’t have preserved cocoons as old as this, in part because of challenges with archaeological preservation.”

The cocoons were discovered by a Chinese and Uzbek research team conducting excavations at three Bronze Age archaeological sites situated along the Surkhan-Darya River in Uzbekistan, including a site known as Sapalli Tepe. Locally arid conditions at Sepalli Tepe allowed for these cocoons to remain intact and identifiable among fragments of wood charcoal and plant seed remains. Silk proteins extracted from the cocoons were subsequently dated and confirmed to belong to the Bombyx mori silkworm moth species. 

“The identification of these cocoons as Bombyx mori is particularly significant because it links them to the mulberry-based silk tradition that originated in ancient China,” Liu said. “This differs from the non-Bombyx silk traditions historically prevalent in South Asia, including Tussar, Eri and Muga silks, which relied on other moth species and host plants.

“Our study reveals the presence of domesticated Bombyx silkworms, mulberry trees and other fruits and crops at nearly 2,000 BCE,” Liu said. “Taken together, the evidence shows that East Asian Bombyx-mulberry sericulture had reached southern Central Asia by about 4,000 years ago, long before the establishment of the historical Silk Road.”

Very hungry caterpillars

The practice of rearing silkworms by feeding them leaves from specially grown mulberry trees is historically important to cultures across Asia. 

A story about the origin of silk is often retold. According to Chinese legend, silk was discovered by Empress Leizu, wife of the Yellow Emperor, when a silkworm cocoon fell into her hot cup of tea. As the tight knot of the cocoon loosened in the hot water, its fibers partly unspooled. The empress had a vision for how this filament could be used.

A single silkworm can spin a continuous filament of silk up to 900 meters in length. But to harvest silk in useful amounts, people needed a way to purposefully raise many silkworm caterpillars at once. And that meant feeding those very hungry caterpillars what they wanted to eat: mulberry leaves.

As the food source for Bombyx silkworms, mulberry trees — notably the white mulberry tree — were globally dispersed, but when and how this dispersal unfolded remains obscure, Liu said. At the Sapalli Tepe archaeological site, researchers also found chunks of charcoal that they identified as remnants of mulberry trees.

“The evidence of the mulberry tree is quite important. Ecologically, these trees are not native to Central Asia and could adapt to the southern Himalayan environment much better than the northern arid environment,” Liu said. “So that’s hinting at a trans-Himalayan connection, rather than an inner-Asian mountain connection. The recovery of citrus wood charcoal at the site further strengthens this interpretation, as cultivated citrus likely originated in South Asia.

“Why this early dispersal of Bombyx-mulberry sericulture, possibly along a Himalayan route, did not lead to a clearly documented and enduring Bombyx silk tradition in the region remains unclear,” Liu said. “Historically, South Asian sericulture was characterized with use of non-Bombyx silkworms. Future research investigating archaeological evidence along both the northern and southern fringes of the Tibetan Plateau will therefore be timely.”

The study also describes additional evidence for local silk production in the form of a fabric fragment recovered from Sapalli Tepe during an older excavation, completed by Soviet archaeologists in the 1970s. Although a new, direct analysis of this fragment wasn’t possible due to conservation restrictions, Liu said existing documentation confirms that this fabric was produced using a traditional plain-weave technique of spun yarn, consistent with the Chinese style of silk manufacture. 

“The co-occurrence of Bombyx mori cocoons, mulberry charcoal and silk-like fabrics at Sapalli Tepe indicates an unambiguous connection with East Asia sericultural traditions,” Liu said. 

Another form of early globalization

The findings from this new study are the latest to challenge the conventional timeline of the Silk Road and of Eurasian interconnectivity. Liu is one of a handful of scholars who have recently uncovered evidence documenting the spread of cereals, fruits, metallurgy and livestock connecting ancient China with the Central and South Asian environments during the third and second millennia BCE — much earlier than the Han dynasty and the Silk Road. 

“We know this was a period of time when communities across the Eurasian continent were exchanging goods and learning from one another, in some cases underlined by population movement and in some cases by cultural inspiration,” Liu said.

“Before this evidence, we saw the appearance of a globalization focused on domesticated grains — such as wheat, barley and millets — and livestock, including sheep, goat and cattle,” he said. “Now it looks like making silk fibers is part of that early globalization.”

This alternate path and timeline adds to the momentum for rethinking the Silk Road, Liu said. 

“It is likely that dispersals of silk and sericulture were much older than the Silk Road, starting from the Bronze Age,” he said.

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This study was completed in collaboration with researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aec8738