David Derbyshire
Daily Mail
It was a small step for an apeman, but a giant leap for mankind.
Scientists have pinpointed the moment when our ancestors finally abandoned the trees to walk upright like modern people.
In a breakthrough that helps rewrite human evolution, researchers have found a fossilised foot bone from an early human relative who strolled confidently on two legs more than 3.2million years ago.
The finding ends decades of debate about when our ancestors first began to walk like modern man, rather than clambering around the trees like gorillas and chimps.
The bone belonged to Australopithecus afarensis – a creature best known from the discovery of ‘Lucy’, whose partial skeleton was dug up in Ethiopia in 1974.
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