* Astronomy

Fossil footprints tell story of human origins

Footprints made by early humans millions of years ago have been uncovered in Tanzania close to where similar tracks were found in the 1970s.
The impressions were made when some of our distant relatives walked together across wet volcanic ash.
Their makers, most likely Australopithecus afarensis, appear to have had a wide range of body sizes.
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3.3-Million-Year-Old Baby Shows Lucy's Species Hung Out in Trees

The 1974 discovery of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year old skeleton of an ancestral species known as Australopithecus afarensis, demonstrated that our ancestors evolved adaptations to upright walking before brain size expanded (another key human trait). But experts disagreed vehemently over just how dedicated Lucy's species was to life on the ground. Some thought that A. afarensis had thoroughly abandoned the trees, that its anatomy demanded a terrestrial lifestyle and that any features suggestive of tree climbing were merely harmless evolutionary holdovers from an arboreal ancestor. Others maintained that A. afarensis still spent a considerable amount of time in the trees, and that the arboreal traits figured importantly in the survival of the species.
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Lucy (also given a second (Amharic) name: dinqine, or Dinkenesh, meaning "you are amazing") is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of an individual Australopithecus afarensis. The specimen was discovered on the 30th November, 1974, at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.
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Ancient footprints show human-like walking began nearly four million years ago

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that ancient footprints in Laetoli, Tanzania, show that human-like features of the feet and gait existed almost two million years earlier than previously thought.
Many earlier studies have suggested that the characteristics of the human foot, such as the ability to push off the ground with the big toe, and a fully upright bipedal gait, emerged in early Homo, approximately 1.9 million years-ago.
Liverpool researchers, however, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Manchester and Bournemouth University, have now shown that footprints of a human ancestor dating back 3.7 million years ago, show features of the foot with more similarities to the gait of modern humans than with the type of bipedal walking used by chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas.
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