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Discover the dawn of civilisation at multiple excavation sites in Turkey
newscientist.com/toursprints to reconstruct a scene from roughly
12,000 years ago. They found the tracks
belonged to at least 17 people from our own
species, Homo sapiens, making this the largest
collection of ancient human prints ever found
in Africa. The researchers concluded that the
group was probably comprised of 14 women,
two men and a youngster. All members of the
group were walking at the same speed – a
leisurely 1.2 to 1.5 metres per second – which
suggests they were travelling together.
Armed with this kind of evidence, we
can begin to make educated guesses at what
these people were up to. In modern hunter-
gatherer communities, groups of women
often work together to forage for food. This
could be what was going on in the ancient
group. If so, it tells us something about the
division of labour between the sexes at the
tail end of the Stone Age. “I don’t know how
you would potentially observe that sort of“ The trails
typically
meander across
the landscape,
like a family on
a Sunday stroll”
GR
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If you want to read information from
footprints, it pays to turn to the experts.
People from some Indigenous communities
depend on their ability to track animals
during hunts. This fact hasn’t been lost
on scientists.
For more than a century, archaeologists
have puzzled over 17,000-year-old
human footprints found in the Tuc
d’Audoubert cave in southern France.
Many of the prints were made using the
heels only, leading to the suggestion that
they may be evidence of some ritual, linked
to a nearby sculpture of two lifelike bison.
In 2013, a European team invited
three Ju/’Hoansi trackers from Namibia
to take a look. “They told me it was a
challenge,” says Dam Debe, a Ju/’Hoansi
tracker and a colleague of the trio. The
footprints were far older than those the
trackers normally encounter.
They did, however, arrive at a new
interpretation of the events that took place
in the cave millennia ago. The prints are
those of a teenager and a man in his 30swho were busily collecting clay from
a small pit in the cave floor to make
the bison sculpture.
Why did they walk on their
heels? Because, said the trackers, a
knowledgeable person can recognise
a member of their community from their
full footprint. Walking on the heels is
awkward, but it is an effective way forsomeone to conceal their identity – which
might have been important to the sculptors
if the artwork had ritual significance.
“I feel that the approach the trackers
employ is similar to the methods used
by Western scientists,” says Megan
Biesele at the Kalahari Peoples Fund
in Austin, Texas, who witnessed the
trackers at work in France.Cave of the sacred bison
Clay bison sculptures
in Tuc d’Audoubert cave
in the south of Francefrom ancient animals. In 2017, David Bustos,
who works with the National Park Service at
White Sands, discovered human footprints.
Shortly afterwards, Bennett travelled there
to search for more prints. He has been
investigating intensely ever since.
“Most of the trackways at White Sands involve
a couple of adults and a gaggle of children,” says
Bennett. The trails typically meander across the
landscape, the sort of thing you would expect
from a family on a Sunday afternoon stroll. But
one set that Bennett, Bustos and their colleagues
came across was different: tracks of a single
person striding out in a straight line. These
would prove to be the prints that told the story
of the young woman, the child and the ground
sloth. But Bennett and Bustos didn’t know that
when they first set out to follow the trail.
Soon, they realised there were actually two
sets of tracks: one heading roughly north for
at least 1.5 kilometres; the other, less thansocial dynamic using any other line of
archaeological evidence,” says Hatala.
Some of the most thrilling footprints to
emerge so far were found at a site called White
Sands National Park in New Mexico. This
isolated area is surrounded by a missile range
and has spectacular dunes and salt flats that
make it popular with film-makers. It contains
a huge playa, or dried-up lake, where we have
long known there are fossilised footprints