By Will DunhamWASHINGTON (Reuters) -Scientists have solved the mystery of 3.4 million-year-old fossils called the “Burtele Foot” discovered in Ethiopia in 2009, finding they belonged to an enigmatic human ancestor that lived alongside another closely related species during a poorly understood time in human evolution.Based on the recent discovery nearby of 25 teeth and the jawbone of a 4-1/2 year-old child, scientists have determined that the eight foot bones represent the species Australopithecus deyiremeda, which combined ape-like and human-like traits and was first identified just a decade ago.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe Burtele Foot, so named because the bones were found at a site called Burtele in northeastern Ethiopia’s Afar region, showed that this species was bipedal but still had an opposable big toe, a feature useful for tree climbing – evidence that while it walked upright it did so in a different manner than people today.The fossils show that two closely related hominins – species in the human evolutionary lineage – lived at the same time and place, with Australopithecus afarensis as the other species. This raises the question of whether these close cousins leveraged the same resources or were sufficiently different as to avoid direct competition.Australopithecus afarensis is the species that includes the famous fossil Lucy, discovered in 1974 in the Afar region.The new findings add depth to the understanding of this period of human evolution, long before our species Homo sapiens arose roughly 300,000 years ago.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement”They provide us with the most conclusive evidence showing that Australopithecus afarensis – Lucy’s species – was not the only human ancestor that lived between 3.5 and 3.3 million years ago,” said paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins and lead author of the study published this week in the journal …
