Man walked tall 3 million years ago

London - 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.

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 around 3 million 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 monkeys.

The newly discovered bone is a complete fourth metatarsal - one of the long bones that connects the toe to the base of the foot, which has become more famous for pre-World Cup injury scares to England footballers such as Wayne Rooney and David Beckham.

The fossilised bone belonged to Australopithecus afarensis - best known from the discovery of “Lucy”, whose partial skeleton was dug up in Ethiopia in 1974.

Previously, experts believed that Homo erectus was the first member of the family tree to walk upright, between 1.8 million and 70,000 years ago.

But this discovery confirms that the development actually took place between one and two million years earlier.

The fossil shows that Lucy’s feet had fixed arches, a trait only found in humans and which evolved to cope with running and walking long distances.

Dr Carol Ward from the University of Missouri, who led the study, said: “Now that we know Lucy and her relatives had arches in their feet, this affects much of what we know about them, from where they lived to what they ate and how they avoided predators.

“The development of arched feet was a fundamental shift toward the human condition, because it meant giving up the ability to use the big toe for grasping branches, signalling that our ancestors had finally abandoned life in the trees in favour of life on the ground.”

Lucy’s species lived between 3.7million and 2.9million years ago and were known to be able to walk on two feet. However, researchers did not know whether they spent most of their time on all fours or upright.

Dr Ward said: “Arches in the feet are a key component of human-like walking because they absorb shock and also provide a stiff platform so that we can push off from our feet and move forward.

“Understanding that the arch appeared very early in our evolution shows that the unique structure of our feet is fundamental to human locomotion.”

The discovery of the bone, in Hadar, Ethiopia, is reported today in the journal Science.

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