In 2009, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team were combing the desert landscape of Burtele, a paleontological site in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, when Stephanie Melillo found something remarkable: an ancient, humanlike foot bone.
“It was half of the fourth metatarsal ray,” says Haile-Selassie, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, referring to the bone that connects to the fourth toe. “When she came over and showed it to me, I just told her, go back, the other half should be there.”
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