They really hot-footed it out of there –
A new study says footprints in volcanic rock probably belong to Homo heidelbergensis.
Another layer of ash later covered the slope, sealing away at least 350 tracks until the early s, when erosion revealed them to the local humans. The tracks record where at least five climbers, all with different foot sizes, walked down the steep, ash-covered hillside. One trail zigzags back and forth downhill, and you can easily picture climbers carefully working their way diagonally across the slope. Along another, more curving path, there are still handprints where the climbers reached out to steady themselves, and a slide mark reveals where one climber slipped.
These aren’t the devil’s tracks, but whose are they?
– century locals were right about one thing: the footprints weren’t left by our species. In fact, our species didn’t technically exist yet. Instead, the footprints most likely belong to an evolutionary relative of ours: Homo heidelbergensis , the species that gave rise to Neanderthals around 430, (years ago.)
One of the newly identified prints at the site records a surprising amount of detail about a climber’s right foot: the wide heel, the low arch, and the base of the big toe. Overall, Panarello and his colleagues say it looks very similar to the feet of , (year-old) H. heidelbergensis fossils from Sima de los Huesos cave in Spain. That lines up with a 2018 study, which found that the short, wide shape of the footprints matched well with the size of fossil feet from h. heidelbergensis elsewhere in Europe.
Prepare to split some hominin hairs
First, paleoanthropologists in general don’t yet agree on exactly when some of the hominins running around Europe stopped being H. heidelbergensis and started being Neanderthals. Evolutionary change is such a gradual process, and it’s not clear whether there was a gradual replacement or a branching split. Around the time of the eruption, some
Because Ceprano is so close by, Panarello and his colleagues say that the hominins who climbed the volcanic debris at Roccamonfina probably belonged to the same species or subspecies. Some paleoanthropologists say that the Ceprano skull belonged to yet another hominin species (called
Homo) cepranenis because its thick skull and heavy brow ridges looked like it belonged somewhere between Homo erectus and H. heidelbergensis on the evolutionary tree. On the other hand, a (reconstruction of the skull) suggested that it actually belonged to H. heidelbergensis – but a local population that had kept the species’ older features instead of evolving to look more Neanderthal-like.Of course, Neanderthals weren’t much different from us, as a growing pile of archaeological evidence shows. And that means they may have just been checking out the damage. Evidence at other sites makes it pretty clear that sometimes humans just want to look around , even if it’s dangerous (sometimes especially if it’s dangerous).
(Journal of Quaternary Science , (DOI:) . / jqs. ( DOIs ).
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