In early May 2013, erosion of coastal rocks in the area of Haysborough (Norfolk County, UK) exposed soils dating from the early Pleistocene (1-0.78 million years ago) - layered silts. In sediments, partially covered by a sandy beach, at low tide, traces were found - oblong depressions 140-250 mm long, 60-110 mm wide and 30-50 mm deep. The similarity of the grooves to the famous Holocene human footprints has attracted the attention of researchers from the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and Queen Mary University.
Sediment formed at the mouth of a long disappeared river and then covered with sand, keeping the surface of the sediment from collapsing. After stormy weather, the protective sand layer was washed away and sedimentary rocks were exposed. Due to the softness of the sediment, which lay below the tide mark, the tracks were destroyed by tidal erosion within two weeks.
The exposed surface was examined for two weeks using photogrammetric methods that allow the creation of three-dimensional images. Analysis of the material obtained confirmed the initial assumption that we are talking about the traces of ancient people - probably five different individuals. The found footprints, most likely, belong to people of different ages and sex (based on the ratio of foot length to height as 0.15: 1, the height of people who left footprints could vary from 93 cm to 1.7 m). In some cases, heel prints, arch prints and even toes can be clearly seen, showing that the footprints lead south. The shape of the prints, relatively wider than the Homo erectus and Beuys paranthropus traces known from Kenya, are consistent with estimatesmade for the feet of the oldest European hominid Homo antecessor and date back to the early Pleistocene.
The results of the fingerprint study were released on February 7, 2014. The footprints found in Norfolk are estimated to be more than 800 thousand years old. According to Nick Ashton of the British Museum, this find forces us to reconsider previous ideas about the appearance of man in the territory of modern Great Britain and all of Europe. Apparently, the ancient people entered Britain along a bridge connecting it with the rest of Europe, which existed about a million years ago, and left these places about 800 thousand years ago, when the cold snap began. The next hominids in the UK were the Heidelberg people, who lived there no earlier than 500 thousand years ago (the bones and teeth of the Heidelberg man, found in the first half of the 1990s in the Boxgrove area in Sussex, date back to this period).
Promotional video:
Paleolithic ax from Haysborough, found on the beach in 2000.
No remains of Homo antecessor have yet been found in the UK, but in 2010, the same research team that found the tracks in Haysborough found stone tools dating from a similar period. Prior to this discovery, the oldest known human footprints in Great Britain were the Mesolithic prints found in Askmouth, South Wales, dated as little as 4600 BC. e. The Haysborough footprints are the oldest known hominid footprints outside of Africa.
The Norfolk footprints are far too old to be effectively dated by radiocarbon analysis applicable to materials no more than several tens of thousands of years old. Therefore, the dating of the footprints was based on a combination of analysis of the geological context found in the sediments of animal and plant remains (some of which belong to now extinct species) and paleomagnetism - known characteristics of the Earth's magnetic field at different periods.