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Scientists say ancient footprints left in wet dirt on a Kenyan lakeside suggest that two early human ancestors were neighbors about 1.5 million years ago. 

科学家表示，肯尼亚湖畔湿泥土中留下的古代脚印表明，大约 150 万年前，两个早期人类祖先是邻居。 

Two separate species made the sets of footprints “within a matter of hours, or at most days,” said paleontologist Louise Leakey, a writer of the research published recently in the journal Science. Paleontologists study fossils to learn about the history of life on Earth. 

最近发表在《科学》杂志上的这项研究的作者、古生物学家路易丝·利基 (Louise Leakey) 说，两个不同的物种“在几个小时内，或者最多几天内”就留下了这组脚印。古生物学家研究化石是为了了解地球上生命的历史。

Scientists already knew from earlier fossil finds that these two extinct lines of human development – called Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei – lived about the same time in the Turkana Basin. 

科学家们从早期的化石发现中已经知道，这两个已灭绝的人类进化谱系——直立人和博伊西傍人——大约同时生活在图尔卡纳盆地。 

But dating fossils is not exact. “It’s plus or minus a few thousand years,” said paleontologist William Harcourt-Smith of Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was not involved in the study 

但化石年代测定并不准确。“这正负了几千年，”纽约雷曼学院和美国自然历史博物馆的古生物学家威廉·哈考特·史密斯说。他没有参与这项研究 

Yet with fossil footprints, “there’s an actual moment in time preserved,” he said. “It’s an amazing discovery.” 

然而，有了化石足迹，“就保存了一个真实的时间点，”他说。“这是一个惊人的发现。

” Researchers found the fossil footprints in 2021 in what is today Koobi Fora, Kenya, said Leaky, who is based at Stony Brook University in New York. 

纽约石溪大学的 Leaky 表示，研究人员于 2021 年在今天的肯尼亚库比福拉发现了化石足迹。 

Study co-writer Kevin Hatala is a pale