78,000-year-old footprints from Neanderthal man, child and toddler discovered on beach in Portugal
Just before the first lock coche in March 2020, Carlos Neto de Carvalho And his wife, Yilu Zhang, walked along the beach of Monte Clérigo, in southern Portugal. While the geologist and geographer couple rushed over rocky outcrops and an old collapsed cliff, they came across a series of old Neanderthal footprints.
“It was early in the morning of a sunny day, with a perfect light to check the tracks,” Neto de Carvalho told Live Science in an email. But when they brought colleagues to the site to take photos of the tracks, “we were almost trapped by the sudden climb of the tide and must swim and climb a 15 meters [49 feet] Almost vertical cliff with all our equipment, “said Neto de Carvalho.
Their bold adventure has borne fruit. The researchers finally discovered five tracks comprising 26 footprints in Monte Clérigo and, in turn, considerably increased the understanding of the experts of the Neanderthal activities along the Atlantic coast 78,000 years ago.
“The fossil file of hominine fingerprints, and in particular those attributed to Neanderthals, is extremely rare,” wrote Neto de Carvalho and his colleagues in a study published on July 3 in the journal Scientific relationshipsSince the imprints of Neanderthals are almost identical to man.
In this case, the footprints were identified as Neanderthal because modern humans were not in Europe at the time. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that in addition to a few Previous unsuccessful attempts,, Homo sapiens I started leaving Africa 50,000 years ago.
Only six series of Neanderthal footprints had been discovered above. With the tracks of Monte Clérigo, the researchers reported the new conclusion of a single imprint of Praia Do Telheiro, also in southern Portugal, bringing the total number of Neanderthal tracks discovered in Europe at eight.
In Monte Clérigo, the old PAS footprints were made near the shore in a coastal dune. Optically stimulated luminescence The dating, which is the last time a mineral was exposed to the sun, has placed the footprints of 83,000 to 73,000 years.
In relation: DNA of “Thorin”, one of the last Neanderthals, ultimately sequenced, revealing a consanguinity and 50,000 years of genetic isolation
Based on the size and shape of the print of Monte Clérigo, the researchers think that an adult Neanderthal man has mounted and descended the dune, accompanied by a child aged 7 to 9 and a young child under 2 years of age.
“The fact that in the context of footprints for infants from Monte Clérigo was found with those of the elderly suggest that children were present when adults carried out daily activities,” the researchers wrote.
Because the tracks were heading both towards and far from the shore, these Neanderthals may have sought food, such as crustaceans. But another possibility is that the Neanderthals practiced hunting for ambushes or hunting for prey such as horsesDeer or hares, according to the researchers, because some of the Neanderthal footprints were “superimposed” with large mammal tracks.
“On the Monte Clérigo site, the presence of footprints attributed, at least, to an adult male, to a child and to a toddler, to negotiate the steep slope of a dune, allow us to speculate on the proximity of the campsite,” wrote the researchers.
But if the Neanderthals had created a camp in Monte Clérigo, there is none of the evidence today.
“The presence of Neanderthals in these environments was intentional even if seasonal”, wrote the researchers, “taking advantage of the hunt for ambushes or the hunt for prey in a landscape of rugged dunes.”
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