Footprints bring ‘life’ to past

CHILDREN meandered around their parents’ ankles. A man, likely a hunter, dashed through the mud. Somebody dragged a dead animal along the shores of a lake.

Now the footprints they left some 20,000 years ago are giving a fresh perspective on the lives of Australian Aborigines.

Since an Aboriginal park ranger stumbled upon the first print in mid-2003 in Mungo National Park, 500 miles west of Sydney, archaeologists helped by local Aborigines have excavated 457 from the region's shifting sands.

A professor of Australian studies, Steve Webb said: "This is the nearest we've got to prehistoric film where you can see someone's heel slip in the mud as they're running fast.

"It brings that element of life that other archaeological remains can't."

Mr Webb leads a team that is tracing the ancient prints.

Spokesman for the Australian Archaeological Association, Johan Kamminga, said the discovery was "very exciting" as it marked the first time human footprints from the Pleistocene period have been found in Australia.

When the tracks were laid 19-23,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age in swampland near the shores of Willandra Lakes, the habitat was a lush oasis in Australia's arid interior. The lake dried up 14,000 years ago.

Webb and his team believe one set of prints were left by a 6' 6" hunter who sprinted at almost 19 miles an hour across silty clay toward an unknown prey, mud squeezing between his bare toes.

Some tracks reveal unknown game being dragged across mud. Emu and kangaroo tracks are also found in the area.

The prints were laid in wet clay containing calcium carbonate that hardened like concrete when it dried. They were eventually covered by a protective clay crust and sand before being exposed recently by wind erosion at the remote national park.

The prints were dated by determining how long quartz sand grains had been buried in sediments above and below them.

Mr Webb said: "We've got 23 trackways of men running; children walking and wandering around and I want to find where these tracks go and what these people were doing by following them around.

"They're wonderful prints so lifelike. We've hardly scratched the surface," he added.

The New South Wales state government, which has helped fund the research, revealed the footprints' existence Thursday ahead of a report on the find to be published early next year in the Journal of Human Evolution.