Two days ago we talked about the ability of a gorilla capable of bipedal walking like a man. Today, however, we confirm that the forms australopithecines lived millions of years ago had the ability to move as Homo sapiens. The confirmation comes from a study published in the journal Science. University of Minnesota experts have focused their attention on the bone of a foot belonging to a hominid Australopithecus afarensis group and have so found that probably the ancestors of Homo sapiens began to walk a million years earlier than previously thought. The researchers analyzed a small metatarsal bone, the structure that connects the fingers at the base of the foot: the skeletal specimen, in excellent condition, was discovered in Ethiopia, at Hadar, the resort also called''the site of the first family ' 'because it houses a rich concentration of fossils of Australopithecus afarensis, with at least 250 samples linked to at least 17 individuals. Lucy, the famous fossil, dating back 3.2 million years ago, was then able to run and jump like a modern man: "To know that Lucy and her relatives had arched feet change many of the things we know about them, for example where they lived, how they ate and how to avoid predators, "revealed the coordinator of research, the anatomist Carol Ward, University of Missouri. "The development of arched foot has been a fundamental change and demonstrates that our ancestors had finally given up life in the trees." Paleontologists say that now the transition from arboreal life is due to Earth's oldest hominid, the ardipiteco lived about four million years ago.
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