layer—the soft surface that dozens of
these ancient people walked over—still
looms over the cracked, dry lakebed. Flocks
of flamingos fly overhead. As you drive to
the site, giraffes and ostriches mosey by.
It’s completely surreal: This place is just like
it was thousands of years ago.
Unfortunately, the footprints we only re-
cently uncovered have already started to
wear away in the elements. To help scien-
tists avoid eroding more artifacts, the
Smithsonian 3D Digitization Project took
images of the entire site. Now we can do
most of our research remotely, analyzing
marks from anywhere in the world and
printing 3D replicas that teach the public
how our ancestors lived. While I’m sad not
to go back to Engare Sero, this is the best
way to study the site while still preserving
its one-of-a-kind landscape.Human footprints preserved in
ancient mud can give us clues
about how our ancestors
walked, ran, and hung out. Ar-
chaeologists have found marks dating
back more than a million years, while oth-
ers are more recent—some at Engare Sero
in Tanzania are as young as 5,000 years.
I was lucky to have my first field experi-
ence at Engare Sero back in 2010. It was
unlike any dig I’ve done since. At most ar-
chaeological sites, you’re laboriously
digging up remains so old that it’s difficult
to imagine the context in which these be-
ings lived and died. But in Tanzania, we
were gently brushing away a thin layer of
sediment to uncover hundreds of fossilized
prehistoric footprints, and it felt like no
time had passed since our ancestors left
them. The volcano that deposited the ash
TRACE EVIDENCE
excavating ancient prints
in the shadow of a volcano
as told to Jillian Mock / illustrations by Tara JacobyKEVIN HATALA,ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY AT CHATHAM UNIVERSITY
106 SPRING 2019 • POPSCI.COM
FROM THEFIELD
TALES