800,000 year old footprints are earliest evidence of ancient Europeans

A team of archaeologists has made an amazing discovery. Footprints uncovered by the pounding surf of England's Norfolk coast are at least 800,000 years old — the oldest ever found in Europe.

The footprints are already gone from where they were discovered, unfortunately. They were kept safe for millennia by the layers of earth that the North Sea has been eroding away. Once they were uncovered, though, it was only a matter of time before they were also erased by the waves. Fortunately, since the local area — Happisburgh (pronounced Haysborough) — has been known as a rich archaeological site for years now, researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the Natural History Museum were on hand to discover the prints.

Now, after taking numerous pictures of the site, these researchers were able to reconstruct it as a highly accurate 3D computer model. This not only allowed them to confirm that they were footprints, but also that they were human footprints, rather than just some kind of ancient animal. The size and shape of the prints showed that it was a group of adults and children — possibly a family group. Digging down into the sediment layers further from shore allowed them to date the prints, to sometime between 850,000 to 950,000 years ago. According to the Natural History Museum, there are only three sets of footprints that are older than this, and they were all found in Africa.

"This is an extraordinarily rare discovery," Dr. Nick Ashton, a curator at the British Museum, said in a statement. "The Happisburgh site continues to rewrite our understanding of the early human occupation of Britain and indeed of Europe."

The scientists who made the discovery talk about it in this short video:

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The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project, which has been running at Happisburgh for the past 10 years, and has learned much about the conditions in England nearly a million years ago, and about the people, animals and plants that inhabited it. Although the footprints didn't last, their digital duplicates still allowed them to be studied, and the researchers hope that more can be uncovered in the future, so they can learn even more about these early Europeans.

(Image and video courtesy: Natural History Museum)

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