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We are often not on the telephone, e-mail is best at the last minute!
850,000-year-old man's footprints found in Norfolk. Science.
Out of Africa, the oldest man-made footprints, between 850,000 and 950,000 years old, were found on the storm-lashed Happisburgh shore in Norfolk, one of the most rapidly eroded parts of the UK coastline. In two weeks, the ocean tide that uncovered the impressions last May only left behind castings and 3-D pictures by means of Photogrammetrie (assembling hundred of photos) as proof that a small group of a long lost early man had gone this way.
Patterns of print indicate at least five people moving south, taking a break and dawdling around to collect plant or crustacean along the shore. Some of the best surviving impressions, clearly showing heels, arches and four feet - one of which may not have made a clear imprint - are from a man with one leg, corresponding to a contemporary 8 cm tall boot and suggest a heigth of about 1.7m.
"Happisburgh further rewrites our understandings of the early man's occupancy of Britain and Europe. "Although much older footprints have been found in Africa, the impressions are more than twice as old as the oldest in Europe, from the south of Italy and date back about 345,000 years.
Norfolk footprints are the first specimens of humans on the northernmost border of Europe, otherwise only known from fossil bone and fire stone tools from a near-by area. In the few tidal days, the researchers worked at full speed to wash away sea water and brush off sandy to take the impressions.
These originate from the sediment and glacier sediments above and the fossilized remnants of endangered species - identifies Simon Parfitt from the Natural History Museum, among them Mammut, an endangered equine species and an early species of pussom. There were no found anthropogenic specimens, but researchers from Happisburgh's local museum and university have believed that they must be there for a ten-year period and that there is a good possibility of more footprints being uncovered in a coastal line that crumbles with every flood - there has been 30 meters of degradation since the discovery.
Locals observe the beaches every day and call the researchers when they discover something interesting. "There' s a diminutive way to be in the right place at the right moment and see what you see - if it's a manhood that runs out at low water, you could miss it all.
" At that time the weather was similar to Scandinavia, with hot summer and very chilly winter as the group went over the moist silt. Mr stringers says affirmation must await finding fossils, but he feels that the Norfolk hominid were related to humans from Atapuerca in Spain, which was described as a homo andtecessor, trailblazer.
In Europe, he thinks they are died-out, perhaps superseded by another early type of man, the gay hidelbergensis, then by Neanderthal man about 400,000 years ago and eventually by people. After all, it was not always a walk on a beach: the Spaniards' fossil remains show the same markings as the animals' bone, proof of the cannibalistic nature.
A million years of history. - The Laetoli trail, which was dating from two or possibly three anthropogenic forefathers - probably Australopithecus acarensis - who passed over moist vulcanic cinders in Tanzania, has been dating at 3. 6m years. More recent analyses suggest that they were walking in the same way as people today.
- Two footprints found near Ileret, Kenya, in 2009 showing a domed leg, shorts and a big double toed - described by researchers as "essentially a fashionable leg function" - have been dating back 1.5 million years. - The oldest discovery from Europe, the three traces of Homo Hidelbergensis, which were found in the volcano fly ash deposits of Roccamonfina in the south of Italy, date from 325,000 to 385,000 years.
- Australia's oldest footprints, at least 450 footprints in 22 traces of grown-ups and kids at Willandra Lakes in New South Wales in tempered, muddy earthenware - discovered by researchers in 2003, although the locals said they already knew about it - were dating back some 20,000 years.
- The oldest footprints in North America were found in 1961 by farmers in the Chihuan deserts in Mexico and recently date back 10,550 years. In 2006, researchers found further traces in the area that date back 7,250 years.