Chatham Professor Kevin Hatala's Research Shows How Ancient Humans May Have Crossed Paths

Kevin Hatala, Ph.D., was the lead author on a recently published article in Science that provides the first direct evidence of two different fossil human relatives occupying the same landscape and likely interacting with each other. 

Hatala, an associate professor of biology at Chatham University, is the primary author of the study, which examined the fossil footprints of Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei—two ancient human species—found in Kenya. He worked with an international team of researchers from the U.S., Kenya, and the United Kingdom. 

While skeletal fossils have long provided the primary evidence for studying human evolution, new data from fossil footprints reveal fascinating details about the evolution of human anatomy and locomotion, as well as further clues about ancient human behaviors and environments.    

“Fossil footprints are exciting because they provide vivid snapshots that bring our fossil relatives to life. With these kinds of data, we can see how living individuals, millions of years ago, were moving around their environments and potentially interacting with each other, or even with other animals,” says Hatala. “That's something that we can't really get from bones or stone tools. The insights they give us, and the questions they raise, can be rather unique. For example, until now we have struggled to find the necessary data to know whether and how ancient human species may have coexisted and interacted during the early Pleistocene.” 

Contributors to the paper include Erin Marie Williams-Hatala, Ph.D, the program coordinator for the biological sciences at Chatham. Other authors come from Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Turkana Basin Institute, and Stony Brook University. 

In their paper, the authors present a newly discovered ~1.5-million-year-old fossil footprint site in northern Kenya. The site records two different kinds of ancient human footprints, reflecting different patterns of anatomy and locomotion. Hatala and co-authors were able to distinguish the two different kinds of footprints using new methods that they recently developed for 3D analysis. 

The findings have been covered by Reuters, The New York Times, NPR, and other major outlets.