The new footprints from Trachilos in western Crete, could take the trail of early human evolution beyond Africa. Earlier studies had suggested that all fossil hominins older than 1.8 million years (the age of early Homo fossils from Georgia) came from Africa, leading most researchers to conclude that this was where the group evolved. “What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,” said one of the study authors Per Ahlberg, Professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. At approximately 5.7 million years, they are younger than the oldest known fossil hominin, Sahelanthropus from Chad, and contemporary of Orrorin from Kenya, but more than a million years older than Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia, the oldest hominin known from reasobly complete fossils which has an ape-like foot. The researchers who described Ardipithecus argued that it is a direct ancestor of later hominins, implying that a human-like foot had not yet evolved at that time. This conflicts with the hypothesis that Ardipithecus is a direct ancestor of later hominins.