New Study Links Burtele Foot to Australopithecus deyiremeda, Showing Grasping Feet Persisted Later Than Expected

A 2025 reanalysis published in the Journal of Human Evolution has definitively tied the famous Burtele foot (BRT-VP-2/73) from Ethiopia’s Woranso-Mille region to Australopithecus deyiremeda, proving that arboreal grasping capabilities survived in multiple hominin lineages until at least 3.4 million years ago—far later than many models predicted.

Discovered in 2009 and initially described in 2012, the 3.4-million-year-old partial foot preserves a highly divergent, opposable big toe with strong grasping mechanics, alongside a rigid midfoot suited for bipedalism. Earlier attributions linked it to A. afarensis, but new comparative morphology and stratigraphic context now align it unequivocally with A. deyiremeda, the species named in 2015 from the same area.

The foot’s mosaic features—mobile hallux for climbing combined with bipedal adaptations—demonstrate that tree-climbing remained an important part of the locomotor repertoire long after the emergence of habitual terrestriality. This pushes the persistence of arboreal traits in eastern African hominins by several hundred thousand years beyond previous estimates.

Lead author Yohannes Haile-Selᴀssie noted: “The Burtele foot shows that the transition to full terrestriality was gradual and mosaic, not a sudden shift. Multiple species retained climbing ability well into the mid-Pliocene.”

The discovery reinforces that early hominin evolution was far more diverse and experimentally complex than a single linear pathway from tree to ground. Burtele now stands as the clearest evidence that grasping feet were still advantageous—and still in use—when Homo was already on the horizon.