Human evolution: new discoveries in footprints (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, November 18, 2024, 22:17 (2 days ago) @ David Turell

In South Africa:

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-fossil-footprints-south-africa-coast.html

"I am an ichnologist. In 2008 my colleagues and I launched the Cape South Coast Ichnology Project to study a 350km stretch of South Africa's coastline. We've since identified more than 350 vertebrate tracksites, most of them in cemented dunes called aeolianites that date back to the Pleistocene Epoch (also known as the Ice Age), which began about 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago.

"At a global level it is rare to find fossilized hominin tracks. There is something very special about them: a fossil trackway looks as if it could have been created yesterday, and the fact that our own ancestors would have created such tracks fills them with extra meaning. It's always a thrill for researchers to find them.

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"Each site within this 1,200 meter stretch of coastline is from a different rock unit and they appear to span a considerable time interval. Adjacent rocks have been dated using a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence to a range of between 113,000 and 76,000 years (that is a measure of how long ago grains deep within the rocks were exposed to light).

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"Three of the Brenton-on-Sea sites also contain some of the oldest known evidence of humans using sticks. The organic matter from which such sticks were composed would long since have decayed, and the ichnology (trace fossil) record therefore provides what is probably the only viable means of identifying such stick use.

"Sticks could potentially have been used as walking or running aids, to cope with ambulating with an injury, in foraging techniques, for messaging, or for what might be aesthetic purposes, such as inscribing patterns in the sand.

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"Together, the sites containing these hominin tracks and traces provide complementary evidence not just of a human presence through footprints, but also of the behavior of our ancestors, providing details of their activities, their tools and their diet.

"They confirm the importance of the Cape coast as a region of great importance in the evolution of Homo sapiens prior to the subsequent diaspora out of Africa. The great preponderance of hominin tracksites older than 50,000 years has now been documented from South Africa's Cape coast, and a cluster of seven tracksites, like the one we have described, is extremely unusual globally."

Commwnt: H. Sapiens were active all over Africa . This adds to the most southern region.