Oldest Human Footprints Found Outside of Africa

Jane J. Lee

As a group of ancient humans walked across a muddy beach in England nearly a million years ago, little did they know that one day, their footsteps would thrill modern discoverers.

The findbelieved to be the oldest known human footprints found outside of Africawouldn't have happened without a rare combination of mud with just the right consistency, still or slow-flowing water, and a bit of perfect timing on the part of some modern humans.

"We found them by pure chance in May last year," writes Nicholas Ashton, a curator at the British Museum in London, in a blog post about the find. The footprints might help us understand how some of our early human predecessors made their way in the ancient world.

When Ashton and colleagues were at Happisburgh, a beach site in southeastern England, Martin Bates, an archeologist with Trinity Saint David University in Lampeter, England, noticed some hollowed-out holes in hardened sediments, located at the base of a cliff.

Bates thought they looked like footprints, so the researchers decided to investigate. They published their findings online February 7 in the journal PLOS ONE.

"We knew the sediments at Happisburgh were over 800,000 years old," says Ashton. So if the hollows turned out to be footprints, they would be older than anything outside of the cradle of humanity, Africa. (Footprints found there, near Lake Tanzania, are about 3.7 million years old.)

Race Against Time

Driving rain, incoming tides, and poor light hampered efforts to study the prints in the field. Eroding cliffs and relentless tides often uncover and then destroy archaeological sites in the area, so the scientists couldn't be sure how long the footprints would remain. (See "Expedition Underway to Extract Latest Fossil Find From Cradle of Humankind Cave.")

But Ashton and colleagues acquired a series of pictures of the footprints over a two-week period. The footprints were completely gone by the end of May.

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Oldest Human Footprints Found Outside of Africa