What Can the Illeret Footprints Tell Us?

By Dig Labs Contributors

Source: Dig Labs Project

What can a footprint tell us about a species that vanished 1.5 million years ago?

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We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.

Join Our Collaborative Research

“What Can the Illeret Footprints Tell Us?” by Dig Labs Contributors is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.Last edited: June 29, 2026

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Introduction

What can a footprint tell us about a species that vanished 1.5 million years ago? In the mudflats of Ileret, Kenya, researchers have unearthed a "trace fossil" discovery of unprecedented scale: 97 footprints left by more than 20 Homo erectus individuals. They are the oldest direct evidence of a modern human-like bipedal gait. The trail reveals a bombshell: these individuals traveled in cooperative, multi-male groups—a behavior once thought to be unique to later humans.