Discovering human footprints from thousands of years ago is extremely rare due to their ephemeral nature. But there are times when the stars are squared and the marks are preserved. Not that this guarantees much. You have to be in the right place at the right time to find them while the material that hid them is eroded and they are destroyed.
Hence, the discovery made by an international team of archaeologists in Morocco is as exceptional as finding a needle in a haystack. Researchers have discovered by chance footprints left by several humans approximately 90,000 years ago that were encased in hardened sediments.
As explained in an article published in the magazine Scientific Reports, the footprints appeared in a sandy area of 2,800 square meters on the northwest Moroccan coast, near the city of Larache. The specialists were studying rocks near the ocean when they noticed a crack in a nearby area.
As soon as they got closer they noticed that there were more marks. They analyzed them using optically stimulated luminescence and discovered that they had been made approximately 90,300 years ago, during the late Pleistocene, which places them “among the oldest footprints attributed to Homo sapiens worldwide.”
Closer examination showed that they had been made by at least five people. The experts also verified that the 85 footprints - the only ones made by humans from that time found in the southern Mediterranean - had been made by people of different ages, including a small child, an older child, a teenager, an adult of size medium and an extremely tall adult.
Specialists believe that this last individual was a male with a height of close to 189 centimeters, which is exceptionally tall for a prehistoric human. With all those marks, the archaeologists understood that what they had in front of them was a path.
The team of researchers suggests in their article that the preservation of the path was due to a number of factors, such as the location, the composition of the sediment, the position of the beach in relation to the sea, the tides and probably other unknown events.
Although it is unknown what the group of people were doing on the beach or why they were there, the various hypotheses put forward include looking for food or perhaps cooling off. Or perhaps they could have simply been traveling in the area and found the beach route easier to use.
“Larache's footprints represent an important discovery. In fact, nowhere else in North Africa have footprints dating from the Pleistocene or Pliocene been found. They are, therefore, the oldest human footprints in this region and one of the oldest footprints attributed to Homo sapiens in the entire world,” write the authors of the study.
Only two other regions have provided older examples of confirmed footprints of modern humans: a set discovered in the Arabian Peninsula dating back to around 120,000 years ago and another collection in South Africa dating back a whopping 153,000 years.
