This certainly establishes the antiquity of
pioneering primates outside of Africa.
It also pretty well assures us of as yet unconfirmed presence throughout
Asia. They hunted and gathered of course
and likely followed the herds as we have often seen.
They also established a natural breeding stock when
new advanced strains of humanity emerged.
At this point we have suggestive conforming footprints
of course and scant fossil evidence if any for which we must wait. At least we know that looking at bone beds
may well surprise. I do not think anything
like a village existed then but the leap from rock shelter, to lean-to to a
group of shacks is slight.
800,000-YEAR-OLD HUMAN FOOTPRINTS FOUND IN NORFOLK
Article created on Friday, February 7, 2014
The oldest human
footprints ever found outside Africa, left in a muddy river estuary 800,000
years ago, have been discovered in Norfolk by scientists from the British
Museum and other national museums and universities.
The prints were left
by a small group of people heading south across the estuary at Happisburgh,
through a landscape where mammoths, hippos and rhinoceros grazed. Scientists believe
they were a group of adults and children, including one with a foot size the
equivalent of a modern size 8 shoe, suggesting a man about 1.7 metres (5ft
7ins) tall.
The footprints are the
first direct evidence of the earliest known humans in northern Europe,
previously revealed only by the stone tools and animal bones they left
scattered.
Within a fortnight of
the discovery last May, the sea tides that had exposed the footprints destroyed
them, on one of the fastest eroding parts of the East Anglian coast.
However, Nick Ashton of the British Museum and
other scientists managed to record them before they vanished, including taking
casts of some of the best-preserved prints.
“This is an
extraordinarily rare discovery,” Ashton said. “The Happisburgh site continues to
rewrite our understanding of the early human occupation of Britain and indeed
of Europe.”
As winter storms
batter the coast, the scientists hope that further erosion may expose more
footprints.
Last May, when the sea
scoured away a layer of beach sand and exposed the prints, the scientists
immediately believed the long oval hollows were from a prehistoric layer. “At
first we weren’t sure what we were seeing,” Ashton said, “but as we removed any
remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the
hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints, and that we needed to
record the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away.”
Photogrammetry, which
combines photographs to
create a 3D image, confirmed that they were indeed footprints, perhaps of five
individuals. Some were clear enough to show heel, arch and toes – allowing an
estimate of the height of the individuals at 0.9-1.7 metres.
The footprints were
dated from the geology, lying beneath later glacial deposits and the fossil
remains of extinct animals, which Simon Parfitt, of the Natural History Museum,
has identified as including mammoth, an extinct type of horse and an early form
of vole.
On the day the
small group walked across the wet mud, Britain was still joined to continental Europe.
Their river valley, surrounded by coniferous forest, with saltmarsh and
freshwater pools, offered a rich variety of food, including edible plants and
seaweed, shellfish and animals for meat.
So far no fossil
remains of the humans have been found. Chris Stringer, of the Natural History
Museum, an expert on early man, believes they were related to people from
Atapuerca in Spain described as Homo
antecessor, pioneer man. He believes they became extinct in Europe,
perhaps replaced by another early human species, Homo heidelbergensis, then by Neanderthals from around 400,000
years ago and finally by modern humans.
The oldest hominid
prints ever found, at Laetoli in Tanzania, are about 3.5 million years old,
while those found at Lleret in Kenya in 2009 – of people who seem to have
walked erect and with a similar gait to modern humans – have been dated to
around 1.5 million years ago.
The Norfolk tracks are
more than twice the age of the previous oldest found in Europe. Those, left in
volcanic ash in the Campanian plain of southern Italy, were nicknamed the
Devil’s Footprints because they appeared to the modern residents to have been
left in solid rock, and have been dated to around 345,000 years.
The oldest footprints
in the Americas – some found in the Mexican desert in 1961, followed by further
examples discovered last year – are dated to about 10,500 years.
The Happisburgh
project has been running for more than 10 years. The discoveries of the team
form part of a new exhibition opening next week at the Natural History
Museum, Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story.
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