It’s not often that a scientific discovery manages to change the way we think about the entire history of mankind.
An ancient footprint was recently discovered and it turns out that humans were walking about 30,000 years earlier than we previously thought.
Bipedal Homo sapiens lived in South Africa, it has been proven after the discovery of a 153,000-year-old footprint.
It is found in the Garden Route National Park near the coastal town of Knysna on the south coast of the Cape.
The tracks are older than the oldest previous finds, with the previous oldest found in nearby areas being 124,000 years old.
The discoveries were made possible by the optically stimulated luminescence dating method, which analyzes how long it has been since a grain of sand was exposed to sunlight.
Researchers Charles Helm of Nelson Mandela University and Andrew Carr of the University of Leicester write in Conversation: “In 2023, the situation is very different. It looks like people haven’t been looking hard enough or they haven’t been looking in the right places.
“Today, the African count for dated hominin ichnosites (a term that includes both tracks and other tracks) older than 50,000 years stands at 14.
“Given that relatively few skeletal hominin remains have been found on the Cape Coast, the tracks left by our human ancestors as they moved across ancient landscapes are a useful way to add to and improve our understanding of ancient hominins in Africa .”
The scientists involved believe that the area could be home to many bright discoveries given the composition of the soil.
They wrote: “We suspect that other hominin ichnosites are waiting to be discovered on the south shore of the cape and elsewhere along the coast.
“The search should also expand to older deposits in the region, ranging in age from 400,000 years to more than 2 million years.
“A decade from now, we expect the list of ancient hominin ichnosites to be much longer than it is now – and that scientists will be able to learn much more about our ancient ancestors and the landscapes they inhabited.”