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MEXICO CITY - A trail of 13 fossilized footprints running through a valley in a desert in northern Mexico could be among the oldest in the Americas, Mexican archeologists said. The footprints were made by hunter gatherers who are believed to have lived thousands of years ago in the Coahuila valley of Cuatro Cienegas, 190 miles (306 kms) south of Eagle Pass, Texas, said archaeologist Yuri de la Rosa Gutierrez of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. "We believe (the footprints) are between 10,000 and 15,000 years old," De la Rosa said in a news release Wednesday. "We have...

DEER RIVER, Minn. -- Some say footprints found in northern Minnesota belong to the legendary Bigfoot. The prints were found by a Cass County grater operator near Deer River, Minn. When Bigfoot believer Bob Olson heard about the footprints from his granddaughter, he went to see for himself. He made casts of two of the 15-inch prints, which make the 6-foot-5-inch tall man's size-14 feet look small.

Cloud of scholarly dust rises over ancient footprints claim Tuesday, April 25, 2006 BRADLEY T. LEPPER Are the footprints of surprisingly ancient Americans preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash in southern Mexico? In December, an article in the journal Science cast a cloud of doubt over that claim. The authors, Michael Waters and Paul Renne, argue that the ash dated to 1.3 million years ago, much too old for humans on this continent, and that the so-called footprints were nothing more than marks made by the tools of modern workers quarrying the stone with crowbars. Now, Silvia Gonzalez, an archaeologist from...

'Footprints' debate to run and run By Martin Redfern BBC radio science unit The markings in the quarry were first identified in 2003 It was a sensational discovery - human footprints said to be 40,000 years old, preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico. The announcement, in July last year, created a flurry of excitement, but was then promptly dismissed by a second team of researchers who re-dated the rocks at 1.3 million years old, impossibly ancient to bear human traces. The original claim has not gone away, however. The first widespread evidence for the human occupation...

Footprints Reveal Ancient Outback Life CANBERRA, Australia, Dec. 22, 2005 (AP) 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 2003 in Mungo National Park, 500 miles west of Sydney, archaeologists helped by local Aborigines have excavated 457 other prints from the region's shifting sands. "This is the nearest we've got to...

Contact: Robert Sanders rsanders@berkeley.edu 510-643-6998 University of California - Berkeley Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought Berkeley -- Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the...

A plastic replica of a 40,000-year-old, size eight foot has shattered previous theories of the identity of the first humans to walk in the Americas. Scientists made the foot from tracks left on the shore of an ancient volcanic lake in central Mexico. The traditional view is that the first settlers walked across the Bering Strait, from Russia to Alaska, at the end of the last ice age around 11,500 to 11,000 years ago. But the discovery of footprints in the Valsequillo Basin by a British-led team provides new evidence that humans settled in the Americas as early as 40,000...

Footprints of Paleothic Man Found on Cheju Island By Han Eun-jung Footprints of a Paleolithic man, the first to be found in Asia, and fossilized animal tracks dating back to about 50,000 years ago were discovered on Cheju Island, the Cultural Properties Administration said at a press briefing in Seoul on Friday. More than 100 footprints of ancient man and thousands of horse, elephant, bird and deer fossil tracks were found in Namcheju-gun on the southern island province of Cheju and along the shores of the island's Andok-myon. The fossils were discovered by Professor Kim Jung-yul of the Korean National...

Footprints and a fire found from 20,000 years ago 27 March 2002 PHILIP BALLHumans were living in the Tibeatan mountains 16,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. © Bill Bachmann/Alamy Handprints and footprints 20,000 years old reveal that people lived on the Tibetan plateau at the height of the Ice Age - 16,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. The newly found signs of life cast doubt on the idea that a glacier a kilometre thick covered the plateau at that time. David Zhang and S. H. Li of the University of Hong Kong found the marks of at least...

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate....some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land...

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. Ancient human footprints preserved in the ground across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are astonishingly old, scientists reported on Thursday, dating back about 23,000 years to the Ice Age.The results, if they hold up to scrutiny, would rejuvenate the scientific debate about how humans first spread across the Americas, implying that they did so at a time when massive glaciers covered much of their path.Researchers who have argued for such...

The footprints at White Sands were dated by examining the seeds of an aquatic plant that once thrived along the shores of the dried-up lake, Ruppia cirrhosa, commonly known as ditchgrass. According to research published Thursday in the journal Science and co-authored by Bustos, the ancient ditchgrass seeds were found in layers of hard earth both above and below the many human footprints at the site, and they were radiocarbon-dated to determine their age. The tracks at one location have been revealed as both the earliest known footprints and the oldest firm evidence of humans anywhere in the Americas, showing...

About 23,000 years ago, a group of children and teenagers left footprints along Lake Otero in what is now southern New Mexico – perhaps they were fetching water for adults hunting a mammoth or the massive ground sloth that roamed the area in those days. This week, a team of researchers from White Sands National Park, the National Parks Service and others published an article in the journal Science, which concludes that those children’s footprints were the oldest known human tracks ever found in North America. Imprints of the tiny toes were found along outcrops of the since-dried-up lake, which...

Footprints on the Ciampate del Diavolo. (edmondo gnerre/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0) ============================================================================================= According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock. The tracks are known as the "Ciampate del Diavolo"' or "Devil's Trail" – but details published in 2020 reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to be. The mysterious footprints are well known to those living near Roccamonfina, an extinct volcano in southern Italy that hasn't erupted in tens of thousands of years. Since 2001, researchers have...

We present an updated time frame for the 30 m thick late Miocene sedimentary Trachilos section from the island of Crete that contains the potentially oldest hominin footprints. The section is characterized by normal magnetic polarity. New and published foraminifera biostratigraphy results suggest an age of the section within the Mediterranean biozone MMi13d, younger than ~ 6.4 Ma. Calcareous nannoplankton data from sediments exposed near Trachilos and belonging to the same sub-basin indicate deposition during calcareous nannofossil biozone CN9bB, between 6.023 and 6.727 Ma. By integrating the magneto- and biostratigraphic data we correlate the Trachilos section with normal polarity Chron...

Neanderthals lived in parts of the Middle East and Europe from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. During that time, they left behind a lot of evidence of their existence—primarily their bones and crafted objects such as stone tools. Sometimes, though, they also left behind evidence of their activities, such as walking along a beach next to a body of water. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence of as many as 36 individuals walking along a beach—including children.The work involved studying footprints left on Matalascañas beach, in Doñana National Park, in Spain. Prior work there had involved footprints...

Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of Homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo, and elephants bigger than any species seen today The people may have hunted the large mammals but they did not stay long, using the watering hole as a waypoint on a longer journey. This detailed scene was reconstructed by researchers in a new study published in Science Advances on Thursday, following the discovery of ancient human and animal footprints in the Nefud Desert that shed new light...

People walked across a muddy layer of volcanic debris that dates to between around 19,100 and 5,760 years ago, the researchers report May 14 in Scientific Reports. Dating of a thin rock layer that partly overlaps footprint sediment narrows the age range for the footprints to between roughly 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the team says. Engare Sero lies in the vicinity of two much older hominid footprint sites -- nearly 3.7-million-year-old Laetoli (SN: 12/16/16) in Tanzania and 1.5-million-year-old Ileret (SN: 4/16/12) in Kenya. At Engare Sero, Hatala's team analyzed foot impression sizes, distances between prints and which way prints...

The 257 fossil footprints were found in a coastal creek bed in Le Rozel in northern France. They were made around 80,000 years ago and preserved in sandy mud. Most of the footprints were from children and may show that Neanderthals could have been taller than previously thought. "The discovery of so many Neanderthal footprints at one site is extraordinary," says Isabelle de Groote at Liverpool John Moores University, who was not involved with the study. Before this, only nine Neanderthal footprints were known, from 4 different sites, says Jérémy Duveau of the MuséumNational d'Histoire Naturelle in France, who led...

A "treasure trove" of dinosaur footprints — from at least seven different species, including a species of stegosaur — that date back about 100 million years have been uncovered by storm surge in the United Kingdom, researchers from the University of Cambridge revealed on Monday. More than 85 "well-preserved" dinosaur prints from the Cretaceous period were recovered in East Sussex, along cliffs near Hastings, from 2014 through 2018, the researchers said. Their impressive findings were recently published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. "Many of the footprints — which range in size from less than 2 cm to over 60 cm across — are...