London: In an extraordinary find, scientists have discovered the oldest human footprints ever to be found outside Africa in a muddy river estuary in Norfolk, east of England.
Around 50 prints made by members of an early species of prehistoric humans, nearly a million-year-old, were found on the shores of Happisburgh and the extraordinary markings have now been published in the science journal 'Plos One'.
"This is an extraordinarily rare discovery. The Happisburgh site continues to rewrite our understanding of the early human occupation of Britain and indeed of Europe," said Nick Ashton of the British Museum, among the group of scientists behind the discovery.
The markings were first identified in May last year during a low tide. Rough seas had eroded the sandy beach to reveal a series of elongated hollows. 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.
So far no fossil remains of the humans have been found. 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.
