The prints were made in wet volcanic mudflow, which would have dried quickly into a hard surface.
Thousands of years ago, a group of people took a walk in what is now Tanzania. The footprints they left behind are now offering insights into ancient human life.
“Sites like Engare Sero form over very short time intervals, and so they capture snapshots in time of ancient humans moving across their landscapes,” said Kevin Hatala, assistant professor of biology at Chatham University, who led the research. The largest group of human footprints ever found in Africa – discovered at a site called Engare Sero, south of Tanzania’s Lake Natron – offers a glimpse at what humans in the so-called Late Pleistocene period looked like. COURTESY OF CINTHYA LIUTKUS-PIERCE/AFP/Cynthia LIUTKUS-PIERCE
That, combined with other evidence including the lack of overlap on footprints, strongly suggests the impressions were made by a group travelling together at the same time, rather than by individuals moving across the same area at different times. There is some room for error, they acknowledge, with the possibility that the smaller feet and shorter strides they attributed to women could in some cases belong to children or adolescents of either gender.
“However, skeletal material from this time period and region is generally scarce, underscoring the value of the relatively large sample of anatomical data that is preserved on the Engare Sero footprint surface.”In modern-day hunter-gatherer communities, large numbers of women rarely move in a group, unaccompanied by children or a similar number of adult men, except when foraging for food.
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