Fossilised footprints help to tell bigger tale

The impressions revealed that as the children followed the herd, they were bubbling over with energy. Photo / Getty Images

LONDON - The fossilised footprints of a group of young children playing as they scampered after livestock have been discovered by a team of British palaeontologists in Namibia.

The impressions revealed that as the children followed the herd, they were bubbling over with energy, skipping and jumping across the muddy terrain. For fossilised remains, the prints are relatively youthful, being just under 2000 years old.

All of the children's footprints, with scores more human tracks in the Khuiseb Delta, are being recorded in detail with an optical laser scanner and are to be placed in a digital archive.

The collection, the first of its kind, is designed to hold every single fossilised footprint left by humans and their ancestors, with the aim of trying to shed light on how humans evolved.

Also undergoing fresh analysis are tracks from Kenya that caused a sensation last year, and prints in Australia which, some researchers claim, show that prehistoric Aborigines could run faster than Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt - although this is hotly disputed.

Professor Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University, part of a team that found the second-oldest footprints left by a hominid, said the digital resource would help researchers work out how ancient people walked, and in doing so discover why it was that mankind's ancestors left Africa.

The team's development of an optical laser scanner helped them conclude that Homo erectus walked just like Homo sapiens does, meaning modern capabilities had already developed at least 1.5 million years ago.

The project is being carried out by researchers at Bournemouth University and the University of Liverpool.

- INDEPENDENT