'Homo Naledi' Foot Bone Fossils Indicate Walking As Well As Tree Climbing Habits

Recently, in a cave in South Africa, scientists discovered 'Homo naledi' a new, extinct human ancestor. But exactly one month later, we have a better understanding of how our relatives walked upright and swung from tree to tree, according to natureworldnews.  

The archaeologists had unearthed an interesting trove of 1,550 fossils from Rising Star cave. While they felt that the feet were the "most human-like body part" of H. naledi, the species did not really use their legs in the same manner that the modern humans----dubbed Homo sapiens---do today.

The scientists looked at about 107 foot bones, finding from them that H. naledi was able to stand as well as walk as bipeds. However, it also appeared to be well-adapted to climbing trees. The hand bones show how and why, giving an insight into the skeleton as well as the function of our forefathers.

"Homo naledi's foot is far more advanced than other parts of its body, for instance, its shoulders, skull, or pelvis," William Harcourt-Smith, lead author of the new paper and a resident research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology, explains in a news release.

"Quite obviously, having a very human-like foot was advantageous to this creature because it was the foot that lost its primitive, or ape-like, features first. That can tell us a great deal in terms of the selective pressures this species was facing."

Most of H. naledi's foot bones seem to be human. But the foot was more curved and the feet were flatter than humans'. They could walk upright, yet they were tree-climbers too, as evidenced by their long and curved fingers and ape-like shoulder joints.

"This species has a unique combination of traits below the neck, and that adds another type of bipedalism to our record of human evolution," Harcourt-Smith said, according to amnh. "There were lots of different experiments happening within hominins--it wasn't just a linear route to how we walk today. We are a messy lineage, and not just in our skulls and our teeth. We're messy in the way we moved around."

However, it is not clear which date these fossils fit into, or in which era of human evolution they were in.

Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature  Communications.