Backing up what the Alternative Archaeology crowd have been saying for years, it seems humans have been around for many millions of years. The standard model of human evolution seems to be unravelling and it all seems to be realigning to the alternative theories that were being rubbished not so long ago. In fact it all seems to happening with careful timing. But hey, I’m a “tin hatter” so I see conspiracies everywhere!
As if the Laetoli footprints weren’t controversial enough (they aren’t “Lucy” prints regardless of what her adherents claim, and in fact are indistinguishable from modern human footprints) along comes these bipedal hominid prints pushing the timeline back by millions of years further…AND NOT FROM AFRICA!
And a human foot logically suggests a human body. So there goes “out of Africa” and there goes “Lucy is Eve” out the window.
I include two articles, the first being an MSM source, the second for the more technically inclined:
Martin H
http://newatlas.com/author/michael-irving/
We share plenty of features with apes, but the shape of our feet isn’t one of them. So that makes the discovery of human-like footprints dating back 5.7 million years – a time when our ancestors were thought to still be getting around on ape-like feet – a surprising one. Further confounding the mystery is the fact that these prints were found in the Greek islands, implying hominins left Africa much earlier than our current narrative suggests.
Fossilized bones and footprints have helped us piece together the history of human evolution. One of the earliest hominins – ancestors of ours that are more closely related to humans than chimps – was a species called Ardipithecus ramidus, which is known from over 100 specimens. Living about 4.4 million years ago, it had an ape-like foot, with the hallux (the big toe) pointing out sideways rather than falling in line like ours. Fast-forward about 700,000 years, and a set of footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania shows that a more human foot shape had evolved by then.
Enter the newly-discovered footprints. Found in Trachilos in western Crete, they have a distinctly human-like shape, with a big toe of a similar size, shape and position to ours. They appear to have been made by a more primitive hominin than the creature that left the Laetoli prints, but there’s a problem: they also predate Ardipithecus by about 1.3 million years. That means a human-like foot had evolved much earlier than previously thought, throwing a spanner into the accepted idea that the ape-footed Ardipithecus was a direct human
ancestor.
THE REST:
https://newatlas.com/fossil-footprints-human-evolution/51163/
Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?
Abstract:
We describe late Miocene tetrapod footprints (tracks) from the Trachilos locality in western Crete (Greece), which show hominin-like characteristics. They occur in an emergent horizon within an otherwise marginal marine succession of Messinian age (latest Miocene), dated to approximately 5.7 Ma (million years), just prior to the Messinian Salinity Crisis. The tracks indicate that the trackmaker lacked claws, and was bipedal, plantigrade, pentadactyl and strongly entaxonic. The impression of the large and non-divergent first digit (hallux) has a narrow neck and bulbous asymmetrical distal pad. The lateral digit impressions become progressively smaller so that the digital region as a whole is strongly asymmetrical. A large, rounded ball impression is associated with the hallux. Morphometric analysis shows the footprints to have outlines that are distinct from modern non-hominin primates and resemble those of hominins. The interpretation of these footprints is potentially controversial. The print morphology suggests that the trackmaker was a basal member of the clade Hominini, but as Crete is some distance outside the known geographical range of pre-Pleistocene hominins we must also entertain the possibility that they represent a hitherto unknown late Miocene primate that convergently evolved human-like foot anatomy.
THE REST:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001678781730113X