300,000-year-old snapshot: Oldest human footprints from Germany found:
In a study published today in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany. The tracks were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony. The footprints, presumably from Homo heidelbergensis, are surrounded by several animal tracks—collectively, they present a picture of the ecosystem at that time.
[...] The various tracks at Schöningen offer a snapshot of a family's daily life and may provide information about the behavior and social composition of hominin groups as well as spatial interactions and coexistence with elephant herds and other, smaller mammals, according to the study. "Based on the tracks, including those of children and juveniles, this was probably a family outing rather than a group of adult hunters," says the archaeologist and expert on fossil footprints.
In addition to the human tracks, the team analyzed a series of elephant tracks attributable to the extinct species Palaeoloxodon antiquus—an elephant with straight tusks that was the largest land animal at the time and whose adult bulls reached a body weight of up to 13 tons.
Journal Reference:
Flavio Altamura, Jens Lehmann, Bárbara Rodríguez-Álvarez, et al. Fossil footprints at the late lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen (Germany): A new line of research to reconstruct animal and hominin paleoecology
, Quaternary Science Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108094)
