Asmara – The ” Italian-Eritrean Danakil Expedition”, an international research team coordinated by La Sapienza University of Rome, has discovered an area of fossilised footprints dating 800,000 years ago, including what appear to be traces left by ancient human ancestors human. The discovery was made during the last season of excavations at the Aalad-Amo site in the Buia region in the eastern part of Eritrea. The footprints may be the first clearly identifiable as belonging to Homo erectus, the only hominid species that inhabited the area at that time, a keystone species in human evolutionary history that gave rise to the following ancestors with a larger brain from whom modern man would ultimately derive. “Human fossils are extremely rare fossils. They were first discovered in Africa at Laetoli in Tanzania dating back to 3.7 million years ago, while in Ileret and Koobi For a in Kenya two sites have emerged dating back to 1.5 million to 1.4 million years ago. However no footprint is attributable to the Middle Pleistocene has yet been found. (9Colonne)
