World’s oldest human footprint identified in South Africa
Charles Helm, Nelson Mandela University and Andrew Carr, University of Leicester
Growing discoveries of ancient footprints
Just over two decades ago, as the new millennium began, it seemed that tracks left by our ancient human ancestors dating back more than about 50,000 years were excessively rare. We knew of only four sites in the whole of Africa at that time. Two were from East Africa: Laetoli in Tanzania and Koobi Fora in Kenya. Two were from South Africa (Nahoon and Langebaan). In fact, the Nahoon site, reported in 1966, was the first hominin tracksite ever described.
In 2023 the situation is very different. It appears that people were not looking hard enough or were not looking in the right places. Today the African tally for dated hominin ichnosites (a term that includes both tracks and other traces) older than 50,000 years stands at 14. We can conveniently divide these into an East African cluster (five sites) and a South African cluster from the Cape coast (nine sites). There are a further 10 sites elsewhere in the world including the UK and the Arabian Peninsula.
We’ve found relatively few skeletal hominin remains on the Cape coast. The traces left by our human ancestors as they moved about ancient landscapes are a useful way to complement and enhance our understanding of ancient hominins in Africa.
World’s oldest human footprint
In an April 25, 2023, article published in Ichnos, the international journal of trace fossils, we provided the ages of seven newly dated hominin ichnosites. We have identified them in the past five years on South Africa’s Cape south coast. These sites now form part of the “South African cluster” of nine sites.
We found that the sites ranged in age. The most recent dates back about 71,000 years. The oldest, which dates back 153,000 years, is one of the more remarkable finds recorded in this study. It is the oldest footprint thus far attributed to our species, Homo sapiens.
The new dates corroborate the archaeological record, along with other evidence from the area and time period. This includes the development of sophisticated stone tools, art, jewelery and harvesting of shellfish. It confirms that the Cape south coast was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.
Very different sites
There are significant differences between the East African and South African tracksite clusters. The East African sites are much older. Laetoli, the oldest, is 3.66 million years old, and the youngest is 0.7 million years old. The tracks were not made by Homo sapiens, but by earlier species such as australopithecines, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus. For the most part, the surfaces on which the East African tracks occur have had to be laboriously and meticulously excavated and exposed.
The South African sites on the Cape coast, by contrast, are substantially younger. Scientists have attributed all of them to Homo sapiens. And the tracks tend to be fully exposed when they’re discovered. They’re in rocks known as aeolianites, which are the cemented versions of ancient dunes.
Therefore, scientists don’t usually consider excavation. And, because of the sites’ exposure to the elements and the relatively coarse nature of dune sand, they aren’t usually as well preserved as the East African sites. They’re also vulnerable to erosion, so we often have to work fast to record and analyze them before they’re destroyed by the ocean and the wind.
While this limits the potential for detailed interpretation, we can have the deposits dated. That’s where optically stimulated luminescence comes in.
Illuminating the oldest human footprint
A key challenge when studying the paleo-record – trackways, fossils, or any other kind of ancient sediment – is determining how old the materials are. Without this, it is difficult to evaluate the wider significance of a find, or to interpret the climatic changes that create the geological record. In the case of the Cape south coast aeolianites, the dating method of choice is often optically stimulated luminescence.
This method of dating shows how long ago a grain of sand was exposed to sunlight. In other words, it shows how long that section of sediment has been buried. Given how the tracks in this study were formed – impressions made on wet sand, followed by burial with new blowing sand – it’s a good method as we can be reasonably confident that the dating “clock” started at about the same time the trackway was created.
The Cape south coast is a great place to apply optically stimulated luminescence. First, the sediments are rich in quartz grains, which produce lots of luminescence. Second, the abundant sunshine, wide beaches and ready wind transport of sand to form coastal dunes mean any pre-existing luminescence signals are fully removed prior to the burial event of interest, making for reliable age estimates. This method has underpinned much of the dating of previous finds in the area.
The overall date range of our findings for the hominin ichnosites – about 153,000 to 71,000 years in age – is consistent with ages in previously reported studies from similar geological deposits in the region.
The 153,000-year-old track was found in the Garden Route National Park, west of the coastal town of Knysna on the Cape south coast. The two previously dated South African sites, Nahoon and Langebaan, have yielded ages of about 124,000 years and 117,000 years respectively.
Increased understanding
The work of our research team, based in the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, is not done.
We suspect that further hominin ichnosites are waiting to be discovered on the Cape south coast and elsewhere on the coast. The search also needs to be extended to older deposits in the region, ranging in age from 400,000 years to more than two million years.
A decade from now, we expect the list of ancient hominin ichnosites to be a lot longer than it is at present. Scientists will be able to learn a great deal more about our ancient ancestors and the landscapes they occupied.
Charles Helm, Research Associate, African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela University and Andrew Carr, Senior Lecturer, University of Leicester
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Bottom line: Scientists have identified a footprint in South Africa as the oldest human footprint currently known. A member of Homo sapiens created it 153,000 years ago.
Read more: Fossil footprints are oldest found in Americas
Drying trends recorded in more than 30 Indian lakes: Study
In about 100 large lakes, climate change and human water consumption were identified as the main drivers of water losses and a decline in lake volume
While rivers get all the attention rightfully, lakes have and continue to provide more of the water supply and sustain societies, across the world and, are often not well managed. Representative photo: iStock. More than 30 large lakes in India have recorded a drying trend from 1992 to 2020, a new analysis published in journal Science revealed.
Of them,16 are the major lakes of southern India. Some of these include Mettur, Krishnarajasagar, Nagarjuna Sagar and Idamalayar. Recent droughts may have contributed to reservoir storage declines in southern India, noted the research published on May 18, 2023.
“Except for few lakes, most of the peninsular India lakes are declining in lake levels and storage,” Balaji Rajagopalan, professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of the study, told Down To Earth.
Lakes, which cover three per cent of the global land area, play a key role in regulating climate through carbon cycling.
“While rivers get all the attention rightfully, lakes have and continue to provide more of the water supply and sustain societies, across the world and, are often not well managed,” Rajagopalan added.
Satellite observations have recorded a loss of 90,000 square kilometres (km2) of permanent water area across the world. However, the factors driving such losses are not clear.
Red dots indicate lakes that are drying. Source: Yao et al / Science.
Rajagopalan and his colleagues used satellite observation from 1992-2020 to create a global database of lake water storage. They covered 2,000 of the world’s biggest lakes and reservoirs that contribute to 95 per cent of the total lake water storage on Earth.
They then used models to quantify and attribute trends in lake storage globally to natural changes, climate change and human consumption.
Overall, 53 per cent of the world’s largest lakes have been losing water and 24 per cent have seen an increase. Nearly 33 per cent of the global population resides in a basin with a large, drying lake.
“The analysis also reveals a declining trend in reservoir water storage in both arid and humid regions,” Sarah W Cooley from the University of Oregon wrote in a related article. She was not involved in the study.
Also read: Earth has lost one-fifth of its wetlands since 1700 — but most could still be saved
The drying trend in Arctic lakes is also more pronounced than previously thought, the researchers highlighted. Climate change has some role to play in driving these changes, they said. “The contributions from temperature, precipitation and runoff indirectly indicate the potential role of climate change,” the author explained.
In about 100 large lakes, climate change and human water consumption were identified as the main drivers of water losses and a decline in lake volume.
The climate is linked to factors contributing to the decline of lakes, such as temperature and potential evapotranspiration (combined loss of water through the plant’s process of transpiration and evaporation of water from the Earth’s surface), precipitation and runoff, and human consumption.
The researchers hope to further understand the role of climate in these factors. They also plan to model the variability of paleo-lakes [old lakes] over the Indian subcontinent and how they potentially impact human migration.
Rajagopalan said it is important to understand the approaches to managing lakes in an integrated manner. “This will elevate the status of lakes to their rightful place,” he said.
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