adminThe footprint surface was exposed at low tide as heavy seas removed the beach sands to reveal a series of elongated hollows cut into compacted silts. “At first we weren’t sure what we were seeing,” said Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum. “But as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints.
“We needed to record the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away.”
Over the next two weeks the surface was recorded using photogrammetry, a technique that can stitch together digital photographs to create a permanent record and 3D images of the surface.
It was the analysis of these images that confirmed that the elongated hollows were indeed ancient human footprints, perhaps of five individuals.
Dr Ashton added: “This is an extraordinarily rare discovery. The Happisburgh site continues to re-write our understanding of the early human occupation of Britain and indeed of Europe.”
The analyses were published in the science journal PLOS ONE. They showed that the prints were from a range of adult and juvenile foot sizes and that in some cases the heel, arch and even toes could be identified, equating to modern shoes of up to UK size 8.
Dr Isabelle De Groote from Liverpool John Moores University studied the prints in more detail.
“In some cases we could accurately measure the length and width of the footprints and estimate the height of the individuals who made them,” she said.
“In most populations today and in the past foot length is approximately 15 percent of height. We can therefore estimate that the heights varied from about 0,9m to over 1,7m.
“This height range suggests a mix of adults and children with the largest print possibly being a male.”
The orientation of the footprints suggests that they were heading in a southerly direction.
Over the last 10 years the sediments at Happisburgh have revealed a series of sites with stone tools and fossil bones, dating back to over 800,000 years. This latest discovery is from the same deposits.
“Although we knew that the sediments were old, we had to be certain that the hollows were also ancient and hadn’t been created recently,” said Dr Simon Lewis, a geoarchaeologist at Queen Mary University of London.
“There are no known erosional processes that create that pattern. In addition, the sediments are too compacted for the hollows to have been made recently.”
The age of the site is based on its geological position beneath the glacial deposits that form the cliffs, but also the association with extinct animals.
Simon Parfitt of the Natural History Museum and University College London has studied the mammalian fossils from Happisburgh.
“These include an extinct type of mammoth, extinct horse and early forms of vole. Together they support an age of over 800,000 years.”
The site also preserves plant remains and pollen, together with beetles and shells, which allows a detailed reconstruction of the landscape. At this time Britain was linked by land to continental Europe and the site at Happisburgh would have been on the banks of a wide estuary several miles from the coast.
There would have been muddy freshwater pools on the floodplain with salt marsh and coast nearby.
Deer, bison, mammoth, hippo and rhino grazed the river valley, surrounded by more dense coniferous forest. The estuary provided a rich array of resources for the early humans with edible plant tubers, seaweed and shellfish nearby, while the grazing herds would have provided meat through hunting or scavenging.
Meanwhile, scientists from the British Museum believe the 800,000-year-old footprints may be related to our very early ancestor known as Homo antecessor.
Homo antecessor is one of the earliest known varieties of human discovered in Europe dating back as far as 1,2 million years ago.
The species is believed to have been right-handed, making it different from other apes, and may have used a symbolic language, according to archaeologists who found remains in Burgos, Spain in 1994.
The importance of the Happisburgh footprints is highlighted by the rarity of footprints surviving elsewhere. Only those at Laetoli in Tanzania at about 3,5 million years and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1,5 million years are more ancient.
How Homo antecessor is related to other Homo species in Europe has been fiercely debated. — AP
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