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Evidence indicates humans' early tree-dwelling ancestors were also bipedal
So did we live in trees or did we live in caves? I'm so confused.ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2010) More than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening.
David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, and his colleagues at the University at Albany and City University of New York's Lehman College have developed new experimental evidence indicating that these early hominins were walking with a human-like striding gait as long as 3.6 million years ago.
The results of their research appears in PLoS ONE, a journal from the Public Library of Science.
A trackway of fossil footprints preserved in volcanic ash deposited 3.6 million years ago was uncovered in Laetoli, Tanzania, more than 30 years ago. The significance of those prints for human evolution has been debated ever since.