Just 20 years ago, when the new millennium was about to begin, human footprints from more than 50,000 years ago were extremely rare. Only four sites in Africa (two in South Africa, one in Tanzania, and one in Kenya) were known to have such old records of our ancestors.
But in the middle of 2023 the panorama has changed radically. On the African continent there are already up to 14 older footprint sites, including the oldest known Homo sapiens footprint, dating to around 153,000 years ago and found at the Cape of Good Hope.
In total, nine sites are known in South Africa with footprints older than 50,000 years. And there are another five in East Africa and ten more throughout the rest of the world, including the United Kingdom and the Arabian Peninsula, according to an international team of researchers in their article published in the journal Ichnos.
“Since relatively few hominin skeletal remains have been found on the Cape coast, the footprints left by our human ancestors as they moved through those landscapes are a useful way to complement and enhance our understanding of ancient hominins in Africa,” they explain. .
Seven of these footprints off the south coast of South Africa have been dated to within the last five years. The most recent is from 71,000 years ago and the oldest was left by an ancestor of ours 153,000 years ago. These data—along with the development of sophisticated stone tools, art, jewelry, and shellfish harvesting—confirm that the southern Cape coast was an area in which the first anatomically modern humans survived, evolved, and thrived, before spreading from Africa. to other continents.
There are significant differences between the much older East African groups and South Africa. Laetoli (Tanzania) is the oldest and is 3.66 million years old. The most recent, meanwhile, is 700,000 years old. “Those footprints were not made by Homo Sapiens, but by earlier species such as Australopithecines, Homo Heidelbergensis, and Homo Erectus,” the experts say.
The South African sites, on the other hand, are substantially younger and have all been attributed to our species. The marks tend to be fully exposed when discovered, in rocks known as aeolianites, which are cemented versions of ancient dunes.
Due to exposure to the elements, they are generally not as well preserved as those at East African sites. “They are also vulnerable to erosion, so we often have to work fast to record and analyze them before they are destroyed by the ocean and wind,” they add.
Researchers have used a method known as optically stimulated luminescence to date the aeolianites from the Cape of Good Hope. “This system indicates how long ago a grain of sand was exposed to sunlight or, what is the same, how long that section of sediment has been buried,” they point out.
The 153,000-year-old track was found in the Garden Route National Park, west of the city of Knysna. The two previously dated South African sites, Nahoon and Langebaan, gave ages of about 124,000 years and 117,000 years, respectively.
The team of experts suspect that there are still footprints “waiting to be discovered on the southern coast of the Cape and in other parts of South Africa. The search should also be extended to older deposits in the region, with ages ranging from 400,000 years to more than 2 million years.”
