Scientists discover hundreds of footprints left at the dawn of modern humanity {old news!} (WaPo)

[eppur_se_muova]

This is really dated, but I hadn't heard anything about it, and it seemed worth sharing.

By Sarah Kaplan October 12, 2016 Email the author

The footprints weave intricate paths across the desolate landscape. Some tracks race straight toward an unseen finish line; others meander, the outlines of their ancient owners' toes and curves of their arches carved deeply into the sun-baked earth.

The air shimmers with heat, and the active volcano that locals call "the mountain of God" looms in the middle distance. It's not difficult for geologist Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce to imagine this scene as it would have looked thousands of years ago, when prehistoric people walked across the muddy terrain and left an indelible record of their presence pressed into the ground.

The site in northern Tanzania is the largest assemblage of ancient human footprints in Africa and one of the biggest on the planet, Liutkus-Pierce and her colleagues reported in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The 400-odd footprints, which cover an area the size of a tennis court, were imprinted in deposits from an ancient flood, dried, then covered up with a second layer of mud and preserved for as many as 19,000 years.
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"It'll give us a sense of the group size and structure of these ancient hunter-gatherers," said Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History and a member of Liutkus-Pierce's team. "What's the composition of this group? How many males, how many females and kids, and how many directions are they going? Are they running? Are they walking? Are they walking side by side?"

"For people who work in prehistory, it's incredibly rare to get that kind of snapshot in time," she continued. Most knowledge about ancient communities is reconstructed from exhumed skeletons, scattered tools, animal bones dug up from bygone garbage pits. But the Engare Sero prints have the potential to tell us exactly who lived in this spot, how they related to one another and where they may have been headed."
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/10/12/scientists-discover-hundreds-of-footprints-left-at-the-dawn-of-modern-humanity/?utm_term=.f333dde876e6

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/ancient-human-footprints-africa-volcano-science/



Mudflats in the shadow of the Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano captured a huge trove of ancient human footprints.
Photograph by Robert Clark, National Geographic Creative