Burtele Foot (Ethiopia): The “Ancient” Australopithecus Foot That Survived Longer Than Expected

In 2009, a team led by Yohannes Haile-Selᴀssie discovered a partial foot (BRT-VP-2/73) at the Burtele site in the Woranso-Mille region of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression. Dated to approximately 3.4 million years ago, the fossil—nicknamed the “Burtele foot”—belongs to an early australopithecine and reveals a surprising mix of primitive and derived traits.

The most striking feature is a fully opposable big toe (hallux), similar to that of apes, allowing the foot to grasp branches. This contrasts sharply with the more human-like, aligned big toe seen in Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy,” ~3.2 Ma). The rest of the foot shows a combination of ape-like and human-like features, indicating the individual could both climb trees efficiently and walk bipedally on the ground.

Published in Nature in 2012, the discovery demonstrated that a more primitive foot morphology persisted in eastern Africa at the same time—or even slightly before—the more advanced A. afarensis lineage. In 2015, the same research group described a new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, from nearby fossils; the Burtele foot is widely attributed to this or a closely related taxon.

The find reinforced the “branching bush” model of human evolution: multiple hominin species coexisted in the Afar region between 3.5 and 3.2 million years ago, each with different locomotor adaptations. It also showed that arboreal capabilities did not disappear quickly after the advent of bipedalism.

As of June 2026, the Burtele foot remains one of the key pieces of evidence highlighting locomotor diversity in early hominins. It proves that “ancient” grasping feet survived longer than many researchers had ᴀssumed, adding another layer of complexity to the story of how our ancestors moved through the African landscape.