{"id":24356,"date":"2018-07-18T00:05:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T07:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=24356"},"modified":"2022-06-06T10:42:27","modified_gmt":"2022-06-06T17:42:27","slug":"where-our-human-ancestors-made-an-impression","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/where-our-human-ancestors-made-an-impression\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Our Human Ancestors Made an Impression"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just below the South African village of Brenton-on-Sea, there\u2019s a beach that looks like something out of a tourism brochure: a tiny, sheltered bay with 50 meters of sandy beach at low tide, backed by 100-meter sea cliffs rising into a blue sky. Right where sand and cliffs meet, there is a low-ceilinged cave carved out of the surrounding stone by pounding waves.<\/p>\n

Charles and Linda Helm, along with Guy Thesen, a friend and colleague, came across this coastal gem one day in 2015. They waited for low tide before venturing in. Linda entered first. Not far beyond the cave\u2019s entrance, she spotted a pattern on the ceiling. \u201cI think there\u2019s something up here you\u2019ll want to see,\u201d she said, turning back toward her husband. Protruding from the sloped ceiling\u2014as though pressed down from above\u2014were what looked like human tracks, the kind of foot-sized divots that might be left behind in loose sand.<\/p>\n

The trio thought the tracks might be human. But they were without toe impressions, clear heel marks, or distinct edges. Tired after a long day and without the equipment to properly document the finds\u2014or even flashlights\u2014they reluctantly moved on.<\/p>\n

The next year, they returned and were relieved to find the tracks still there. Crawling on his back deeper into the cave, Helm found nine more prints, this time with toe impressions intact, situated on the ceiling just 50 centimeters above the cave floor. They were clearly human\u2014and it looked as if whoever made the tracks was running.<\/p>\n

\"Charles<\/a>

Charles Helm, right, and his wife, Linda, work in the cave on the South African coast where they found ancient footprints. Photo by Charles Helm<\/p><\/div>\n

Helm, a retired family physician who spends most of the year in remote Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, is also something of an expert on footprints. He has spent close to two decades looking for very, very old tracks of all kinds: not long after emigrating to Canada from South Africa in the 1980s, his eight-year-old son helped discover dinosaur footprints near their new home. Helm and his family later helped establish the Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre in the town, now a tourist destination thanks to dinosaur tracks left behind 100 million years ago.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, Helm has spent his summers back in South Africa, on a mission to look for footprints. He, his family, and colleagues at the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience have surveyed more than 275 kilometers of South African coastline, locating over 100 sites with animal tracks dating back 100,000 years or more.<\/p>\n

The fossilized footprints re-create a vanished world, full of lions and elephants, buffalo and horses. Helm has even found giraffe tracks, evidence that the landscape was dotted with trees. \u201cOne giraffe track and you have an entire paleoecological reconstruction,\u201d he says. \u201cYou get the sense it\u2019s teeming with wildlife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"3D<\/a>

Hours of 3D photogrammetry work reveal the tracks of ancient humans on the South African coast. Photo by Richard McCrea<\/p><\/div>\n

Dinosaurs, elephants, and giraffes were all exciting enough. But when he found those familiar-looking footprints in 2016 protruding from the roof of the cave as though embossed, Helm was really moved. More personal than stone tools, more dynamic than skeletal remains, human footprints create an unparalleled link to the distant past. The analysis of preserved human and animal footprints\u2014known as ichnology, from the Greek word for track\u2014allows us to imagine people not so different from us, standing, running, and playing, hundreds or thousands or even millions of years ago. \u201cTracks are more exciting than body fossils,\u201d Helm says. \u201cThey can tell a story.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Human tracks encode a startling amount of information, enough for scientists to create a brief, but illuminating, biography of a person or group of people. The average person takes an estimated 224,000,000 steps over the course of a lifetime. When preserved, footprints are a library of clues about a human\u2019s activities, speed of travel, height, weight, and sometimes even sex. They are, however, remarkably rare in the archaeological record. At a conference in Cologne, Germany, last year, researchers from around the world gathered to compare notes on some of the most prominent finds.<\/p>\n

Some of the sites were well known: prehistoric human tracks have been found on fossilized lakebeds in Saudi Arabia, deep inside caves in France, and pressed into the ground in Tanzania. The oldest ever found, made by a group of early hominins walking through wet volcanic ash in present-day Tanzania, date back 3.6 million years.<\/p>\n

In the past few years, researchers have found them in unexpected places scattered around the world: modern beaches. Finding ancient footprints in such a dynamic environment seems counterintuitive. Is there anything more ephemeral, after all, than footprints in the sand? You\u2019d think that the action of waves and wind would wipe footprints away quickly. But, in 2012, massive storms in Wales revealed fossilized forests\u2014and the footprints of a child, facing a prehistoric sea. In 2013, researchers stumbled across the 800,000-year-old tracks left behind by children and adults, a small family perhaps, playing on a windswept English beach. The following year, researchers working on British Columbia\u2019s Calvert Island found footprints dating back to the earliest days of human presence in the Americas. The one thing they all have in common is proximity to the ocean.<\/p>\n