Large Footprints, Uncertain Identities: Rethinking Paranthropus at Lake Turkana
Footprints preserved on a Kenyan lakeshore about 1.43 million years ago suggest that Paranthropus boisei could grow substantially larger than earlier skeletal estimates indicated. But identifying their makers exposes a deeper problem: how to reconstruct the bodies and social lives of extinct human relatives when feet, bones and evolutionary expectations do not quite agree.