Prehistoric footprints reveal how ancient men and women divided labor
The Maasai are the current residents of Engare Sero, a region in Northern Tanzania. They've shifted from the nomadic lifestyle that prehistoric humans in the area had. (Tomas Adzke/Deposit Photos/)William E.H. Harcourt-Smith is a research associate in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and associate professor in Anthropology at Lehman College, CUNY. Briana Pobiner is a research scientist and museum educator at Smithsonian Institution. This story originally featured on The Conversation.When it comes to reconstructing how ancient creatures lived, palaeontologists like us are as much detectives as we are scientists.We’re used to partial evidence, dead ends, and red herrings. It’s especially hard to reconstruct ancient behaviors, something we are particularly interested in. We must rely on either skeletal remains or the physical things left behind by ancient people to deduce anything about their lives, be it what they ate, how they moved or the origins...