Track of Man

Rocks yield ancient footprints

Stirred out of his midday snooze, the large hippopotamus emerged from the crocodile-infested waters and lumbered onto the lake shore, leaving giant footprints in the mud. Soon a small, upright figure appeared. Perhaps looking for prey, he carefully trod among the wading birds and other fauna, crossing the trail of large prints along the shore.

A poacher at work in the back country of contemporary Africa? No: this scene, or at least something like it, occurred some 1.5 million years ago, at the edge of Lake Turkana, formerly called Lake Rudolph, in northwestern Kenya.

By himself the creature would hardly have been a match for a hippo or any other large animal he might have encountered. Scarcely 5 ft. tall, he probably weighed no more than 120 lbs. Yet he did show promise. Most anthropologists now regard Homo erectus (literally, erect man) as modern man's immediate ancestor.

Evidence of this prehistoric jaunt was reported last week by U.S. geologists who had been excavating hillside sediments that were once part of the lake. The geological team, led by Kay Behrens-meyer and Leo LaPorte of the University of California at Santa Cruz, found seven footprints in a layer of sediment dated by radioactive clocks to be 1.5 million years old. All the prints apparently belonged to the same individual. One of them showed unmistakably that he, or perhaps she, had slipped while walking.

At the time the spoors were made, Africa was also inhabited by another upright hominid called Australopithecus, or ape of the south. This manlike creature is generally regarded to have been an evolutionary dead end, and not a human forerunner. Remains of both Australopithecus and Homo erectus have been found around Lake Turkana. But researchers believe the footprints more closely resemble those of Homo erectus; they are larger and more widely spaced (which indicates a longer stride) than those associated with Australopithecus, if they are Homo prints, they are the first ever found of an immediate ancestor of modern man.

For the moment, the scientists can say little more about the creature who walked along the lakeside aeons ago. But they are clearly awed by the ancient tracks he left.

Says Yale Anthropologist David Pilbeam, who recently visited the site: "They are much more evocative than old bones. I felt here I am in the presence of our ancestors. These footprints looked like the footprints we would make."

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