Oldest human footprints

Oldest human footprints found outside Africa; as a group of ancient humans walked across a muddy beach in England nearly a million years ago, little did they know that one day, their footsteps would thrill modern discoverers.

The find, believed to be the oldest known human footprints found outside of Africa, wouldn’t have happened without a rare combination of mud with just the right consistency, still or slow - flowing water, and a bit of perfect timing on the part of some modern humans.

When Ashton and colleagues were at Happisburgh, a beach site in southeastern England, Martin Bates, an archeologist with Trinity Saint David University in Lampeter, Wales, noticed some hollowed - out holes in hardened sediments, located at the base of a cliff.

“We found them by pure chance in May last year,” writes Nicholas Ashton, a curator at the British Museum in London, in a blog post about the find. The footprints might help us understand how some of our early human predecessors made their way in the ancient world.

“We knew the sediments at Happisburgh were over 8,00,000 years old,” says Ashton. So if the hollows turned out to be footprints, they would be older than anything outside of the cradle of humanity, Africa. (Footprints found there, near Lake Tanzania, are about 3.7 million years old.).