The Discovery

The discovery of a set of what look like ancient hominin footprints on the island of Crete could throw our understanding of human evolution into disarray. Received wisdom is that after [blank] from the chimp lineage, our hominin ancestors were confined to Africa until around 1.5 million years ago. The prints found in Crete, however, [blank] to a creature that appears to have lived 5.7 million years ago - suggesting a more complex story. More research is needed to confirm what kind of animal made them. However, the prints seem to have been [blank] by a creature that walked upright, on the soles of clawless feet (rather than on its toes), with a big toe positioned like our own, rather than sticking out sideways like an ape's. It may yet turn out to have been a [blank] unknown non-hominin that had evolved with a human-like foot; but the explanatory paper, in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, is not the first to suggest that hominins could have originated in Europe. A few months ago, a team put forward evidence, gleaned from fossils found in Greece and Bulgaria, that a 7.2 million-year old ape known as Graecopithecus was in [blank] a hominin.