The enigma of Lake Ontario's 11,000-year-old footprints

Toronto Star ^ | Sunday, November 23, 2008 | Leslie Scrivener

[SunkenCiv]

In the fall of 1908, while building a waterworks tunnel east of Hanlan's Point in Toronto Bay, a work crew came across 100 footprints in a layer of blue clay. The prints appeared to have been left by people wearing moccasins -- 11,000 years ago. It was an astounding discovery, perhaps the first evidence of human habitation on Lake Ontario, but few recognized its significance. "It looked like a trail ...," city inspector W. H. Cross told the Toronto Evening Telegram about what he saw that November day. "You could follow one man the whole way. Some footprints were on top of the others, partly obliterating them. There were footprints of all sizes, and a single print of a child's foot, three and a half inches..." He went on to describe the way the clay had shot up under the imprints of the heels, how the prints appeared to be heading north, and how he had tried to lift a piece of the clay to preserve the prints, but it broke away in his hand. The group -- likely a family, judging by the different sized prints -- could have been walking from a hunting camp on the shore of Lake Ontario to what is now downtown Toronto. Back then, the shoreline would have been more than a kilometre further south... Without seeing the prints, it's difficult to evaluate their authenticity, Williamson says, though there's no reason to believe that Cross and company were exercising a hoax... Archaeologists have found 11,000-year-old spear points east of Buffalo with mastodon bone that appear to have been shaped into tools.

[SunkenCiv]

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[Onerom99]

They find stuff like thsi in America, “Native” Americans file court challenges to cover it up or else have their entitlement apple cart upset.

[BenLurkin]

Bare feet?

Or moccasins?

[fanfan]

Thanks for the ping, Sunken Civ.

[Max in Utah]

From the second sentence above:

"The prints appeared to have been left by people wearing moccasins -- 11,000 years ago."

[GoLightly]

11,000 years ago, it wouldn’t have been Lake Ontario. It would have been the Glacial Lake Iroquois.