click here for WaPo article on anthropology Footprints can provide a clue. Two sites in Laetoli, Tanzania, feature footprints of human ancestors who lived about 3.6 million years ago. They were members of the genus Australopithecus. That's the genus of “Lucy,” the 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor whose fossilized bones were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Our primate cousins generally continued to live in trees, existing largely on ripe fruit, with their anatomy adapted for vertical climbing and swinging from branch to branch. But long ago, some chose a different path, striking out for the frontier. They went to the ground more often and then, eventually, through many evolutionary changes they left the trees behind altogether.
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