About 100,000 years ago, an extended family of 36 Neanderthals walked along a beach, with the children jumping and frolicking in the sand, scientists report after analyzing the petrified footprints of beachgoers in what is now southern Spain.
“We found some areas where several small footprints appeared in a chaotic arrangement,” said Eduardo Mayoral, a paleontologist at the University of Huelva and lead author of the study, which was published online March 11 in the journal. Scientific reports
The footprints “could indicate a passage area of very young individuals, as if they were playing or hanging out on the shore of the nearby swampy area,” Mayoral told Live Science in an email.
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In June 2020, two biologists discovered the tracks on Matalascañas Beach, in Doñana National Park, after a period of violent storms and tides.
The biologists first saw petrified animal tracks; Some of the footprints were made long ago by large animals, such as deer or wild boars, Mayoral said.
It wasn’t until later, after Mayoral’s team analyzed the prints, that someone realized that some of the footprints were from Neanderthals, he said. “No one recognized the existence of the human-like footprints at the time, which were not discovered by my team until two months later, when we began to study the entire surface in detail.”
Mayoral and colleagues identified 87 Neanderthal footprints in the sedimentary rock at Matalascañas beach. (The researchers determined that those impressions were made by 36 people.)
The exposed surface dates back to the Upper Pleistocene period, about 106,000 years ago, when ancient stone tools discovered nearby indicate that the region was inhabited by Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis)These hunter-gatherers lived in Europe and the Middle East between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, while they were still early modern humans (Drosophila melanogaster) arrived there about 80,000 years ago. The researchers think the tracks may be the oldest Neanderthal footprints ever found in Europe.
At the time the footprints were taken, the now-exposed surface appears to have been along the bank of a waterhole, slightly inland from the coast, which was then further south than it is now, Mayoral said.
“Probably the water would not have been fresh but slightly brackish, as we found evidence of sea salt crystals (halite) on the surface where the footprints are found,” he wrote in the email.
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The team photographed the site extensively with an aerial drone and digitally scanned each of the fossilized human footprints in three dimensions.
The size and distribution of the footprints suggest that they were taken by a group of 36 Neanderthals who were likely related, including 11 children and 25 adults – five females, 14 males and six indeterminate sex individuals.
“By correlation with other European sites, it can be concluded that there is a direct relationship between the size of a footprint and the age of the person who produced it,” said Mayoral.
Most adults walking on the beach would have stood between 4 and 5 feet (1.3 to 1.5 meters) tall, but four prints appear to have been taken by a person who was more than six feet tall. That’s greater than the expected Neanderthals height, so the print may have been made by a shorter person with a heavy gait, the researchers wrote.
Playing in the sand
Of particular note are the two smallest footprints, about 6 inches (14 centimeters) long, believed to have been made by a child about 6 years old. They belong to several footprints that are chaotically grouped in some areas, possibly because the Neanderthal children played in the sand at the watering hole, Mayoral said.
Analysis of the tracks shows that most of the footprints are on the edge of the flooded area, but the individuals who made the prints did not go all the way into the water, the researchers wrote.
“This could be a hunting strategy, stalking animals in the water [such as] waterfowl and waders or small carnivores, ‘they wrote.
The tracks could also have been made by people fishing in the waterhole or looking for shellfish; Evidence of similar hunting and gathering behavior by Neanderthals has been reported in other ancient sites.
Stone tools attributed to Neanderthals have surfaced in nearby sites, but in those cases there was no direct evidence – such as Neanderthal bones or teeth – to confirm their presence, Mayoral said.
That made the fossilized footprints particularly important, the researchers wrote: “ The biological and ethological information of the ancient human groups when there are no bone remains is provided by the study of their fossil footprints, which give us certain ‘frozen’ moments of their existence. “
The footprints were “indisputable evidence of the existence of these hominids in the south of the Iberian Peninsula and, in particular, in this part of the Andalusian coast,” Mayoral said.
Originally published on Live Science