(Right) 1.5 million year-old footprint, (Left) Color-contoured 3D laser scan image of the footprint photo on the right. Credit: Brian Richmond, George Washington University.

The anthropology world is all abuzz with a discovery in Africa that’s knocking scientists off their feet.

It’s the finding of 1.5 million-year-old fossilized human footprints in Kenya at Rutgers University’s Koobi Fora Field School.

Researchers say the ancient footprints show that some of the earliest humans walked just like we do today and also had anatomically modern feet.

The area around the human footprints was also littered with a range of animal prints, all discovered within two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya.

Three footprint trails were found in the upper sediment layer. Two of them had two prints each, while the other had seven prints and numerous isolated prints. Perfectly preserved 15 feet below were one trail of two prints and a single isolated smaller print, possibly that of a child.

The discovery is detailed in this month’s issue of the journal Science.

What makes these footprints decidely human? Researchers say the big toe is parallel to the other toes, whereas in apes, it is separated for better grasping in the trees. What’s more, the footprints show a human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with walking upright. Other clues found to be within the range of modern humans were the size, spacing and depth of the impressions which provided estimates of weight, stride and gait.

The authors say the size of the footprints and their modern anatomical characteristics point to the hominid Homo ergaster, the name by which early Homo erectus is more generally known. This was the first hominid to have had the same body proportions (longer legs and shorter arms) as modern Homo sapiens. Other H. ergaster or H. erectus remains have been found in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, at dates consistent with the Ileret footprints.