But I thought the oceans were rising due to Global Warming?
Local, free newspapers don’t always express themselves accurately! Equally, what they report is not necessarily ‘news’! The ‘Formby Footprints’ have been the subject of on-going, detailed research for more than twenty years! However, perhaps I may answer some of the comments raised.....
Between about seven and five thousand years ago there was a barrier-island protected, muddy, intertidal lagoon at what is now Formby Point, Northwest England. Over a period of some two thousand years favourable weather conditions occasionally allowed the tracks left by animals, birds and Mesolithic-Neolithic human hunter-gatherers to be baked hard into these tidal mud strata. During the Bronze Age, however, there was a westerly progradation of the coastline, and for at least three and a half thousand years these laminated silts and their imprints are known to have been have been sealed in and covered by land. But now, rising sea levels are eroding Formby Point and uncovering the palaeo-landscape and the ancient Holocene sediments. However, these silt exposures and their contents are ephemeral; the very sea and tidal forces that uncover them bring about their inevitable destruction.
The ‘six-foot cattle’ mentioned by the reporter refers to the tracks of the aurochs, a large and ferocious species of wild cattle which was hunted to extinction in Britain by the end of the Bronze Age, some three thousand years ago.
Ikhnos