........................> I definitely would like to keep this thread about science. So any replies that seem to be aimed at creationist myths should be take over to NQS.
As far as walking side by side. There have been some that speculated beyond the evidence of the tracks. Some have tried to claim that the 2 in the lead were showing affection for each other by walking close together. We don't really know that, there are probably all kinds of reasons why they might have been walking close together. What we can say is that they were probably a group. After all there was not a big crowd of them there. It wasn't like walking down the street in a city. They were probably living in relatively small groups. Assuming that they were searching for food, or traveling to a place where they could find food or a place to spend the night then the group as a whole would probably be somewhat spread out over the landscape. We do know that they were close in time to one another. They were walking in what amounted to thin mud, which would probably have dried fairly quickly.
Bill Gill
You make a lot of sense Bill Gill, especially in regard to the two walking close together 3.6 million years ago.
I have taken some items from the afore mentioned Scientific America article, which bears out what you said above.
>
Since Darwin's time it was thought that once upright posture and bipedalism had developed, the hands were then free to evolve manipulative skills. Stone toolmaking, it was supposed, was the critical factor in the emergence of early man. This view, however, was not universally accepted. Some believed that the brain, not erect posture, led the way. Although functional analysis of hominid bones from Africa pointed to early bipedalism, the fossils themselves could not provide the definitive answer.
The Laetoli trackway settled the issue. Excavated by Mary Leakey and her team in 1978 and 1979, the trackway consists of some 70 footprints in two parallel trails about 30 meters long, preserved in hardened volcanic ash. The best-preserved footprints are unmistakably human in appearance and yield evidence of soft tissue anatomy that fossil bones cannot provide. It is significant that the earliest stone tools known are about 2.6 million years old, made nearly a million years after the footprints at Laetoli. The Laetoli hominids were therefore fully bipedal well before the advent of toolmaking—an event considered to define the beginning of culture—and the traces they left behind provide evidence that the feet led the way in the evolution of the modern human brain.
The Laetoli footprints are the most ancient traces yet found of humanity's ancestors.
The prints were impressed in volcanic ash in that location 3.6 million years ago, in sight of the Sadiman volcano 20 kilometers away, whose subsequent ash falls buried them under 30 meters of deposit. Over the aeons the landscape eroded, until now, less than a few feet of soil protects the fragile surface.
While lifting the tracks is doubtless technically possible, it would be enormously costly, require much research, and risk damage or loss. For these reasons, the decision to rebury the site has been made, and if future conditions allow the site to be opened to visitors, it will have been saved.
Mary Leakey may have had the last word when she examined the tracks together with other Anthropologists. She said:-
"Here at this point, and you do not need to be an expert tracker to discern that the lighter hominid stops, pauses, and turns slightly to the left, as though briefly scanning the landscape and then both continue on to the north.
This motion, so intensely human, transcends time. Three million six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor—just as you or I—experienced a moment of doubt." <
