![]() The Engare Sero site-and the researchers who excavated it-owe a great deal to Ol Doinyo Lengai, the volcano that looms over Lake Natron. It’s completely nuts.” Picking Up the Trail “There’s one area where there are so many prints, we’ve nicknamed it the ‘dance hall,’ because I’ve never seen so many prints in one place. “It’s a very complicated site,” says William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the City University of New York and a member of Liutkus-Pierce’s team. Laetoli-a site in Tanzania some 60 miles southwest of Engare Sero-even has 3.6-million-year-old footprints possibly made by the human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis, a discovery partially funded by the National Geographic Society.Įngare Sero is exciting because of the abundance and diversity of prints, which offer a strikingly detailed snapshot of what life was like for our ancestors in Africa. And two sites on the South African coast have Homo sapiens tracks dated as far back as 120,000 years ago. Australia’s Willandra Lakes site, for instance, has 700 fossil footprints made about 20,000 years ago. The Engare Sero tracks, excavated with the support of the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, add to an incredibly exclusive catalog of human footprints that have stood the test of time. It was definitely emotional to see our own history in this.” “Human origins is a huge interest of mine: where we came from, and why we are who we are. ![]() “The first time we went out there, I remember getting out of the vehicle, and I teared up a little bit,” says Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce, the Appalachian State University geologist and National Geographic grantee who led the research. The mud tracked it all-including the dirty droplets that fell from their feet with each step. Yet more tracks suggest that around a dozen people, mostly women and children, traveled across the mudflat together, striking toward the southwest for parts unknown. Other prints imply a person with a slightly strange, possibly broken big toe. Some of the tracks seem to show people jogging through the muck, keeping upwards of a 12-minute-mile pace. This animation shows the likely events that created and preserved a cache of ancient human footprints found in Tanzania.
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