The History of the World Podcast, written and presented by Chris Hasler.

This is volume one, the prehistoric world.

Episode 2, Australopithecines. Oh, East Africa three million years ago, Australopithecines are alive.

They are not just one animal, but many different species. One thing they have in common, like modern humans, they are biopodal,

which means that they would only use their two hind legs for walking, just like us.

However, their brains are substantially smaller than modern humans,

about a third of the size. It has been assumed for many years that humans were the first

toolmakers and there are no humans around during this period.

There are only these animals that may be the ancestors of modern humans.

Therefore we can assume that the Australopithecines did not make tools.

But we will come back to that later.

So how do we know that they were alive? The Latoni

footprints. We are now going to tell the story of an incredible footprint discovery that gives us some

clues about the Australopithecines. But first, let's tell the story of the woman who discovered them.

Mary Nickle was born in London, United Kingdom in 1913.

Mary did not have the best time at school, getting expelled on more than one occasion.

She didn't achieve the qualifications that she maybe should have done.

On one occasion she was apparently expelled for causing an explosion in the chemistry laboratory.

Her passion was for archaeology, but she was not able to study it at university due to her lack

of academic qualification.

This did not stop her from attending local lectures on archaeology and volunteering her services

to archaeological digs where her talent for illustrating artifacts was noticed.

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