These footprints were exposed at Gypsy Path B in context 3 (GPB3) in July 2011. Seven humans walked across this mud around 5,000 years ago. The rose diagram shows directions of movement for these human tracks in GPB3 by number of individuals (n = 7). The stratigraphic context of this footprint bed is shown in Fig. 5. It lies immediately above the radiocarbon date of 5,440–5,050 cal bp. Alison Burn et al Nature Ecology and Evolution
Hundreds of well preserved ancient footprints have been found on Formby Beach, near Liverpool, UK. According to a new paper published in journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, “A new programme of radiocarbon dating shows that the Formby footprints span at least 8,000 years of the Holocene Epoch from the Mesolithic period to Medieval times.” The earliest ones are from 9,000 years ago and the latest ones are from 1,000 years ago.
The time period of these footprints shows how the coastal environment changed over thousands of years with the rise in sea levels. “In a landscape largely devoid of conventional archaeology and faunal records, we show how species data from the footprint stratigraphy document long-term change in both large mammal diversity and human behaviour. The footprint beds record shifting community structure in the native fauna through an era of profound global change”, says the team in the study.
“As sea levels rose rapidly in the Early Holocene, men, women and children formed part of rich Mesolithic intertidal ecosystems from ~9,000 to 6,000 cal bp, with aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, beaver, wolf and lynx.”
Formby Beach where ancient human footprints were found. Alison Burns et al Nature Ecology and Evolution
This means that up to around 6,000 year ago this part of the British coastline was a very diverse landscape with a wide variety of animals. After 5,000 years ago, there are fewer animals and more human footprints with some deer and dogs.
“In the agriculture-based societies that followed, after 5,500 cal bp human footprints dominate the Neolithic period and later beds, alongside a striking fall in large mammal species richness. Stacked footprint beds can form multimillennial records of ecosystem change with precise geographical context that cannot be retrieved from site-based fossil bone assemblages.”
One of the footprints, which is 8,200 years old and belonged to a young man or teenager, and even has a bunion according to the BBC. Six of the Formby sites and 20 footprint beds in have now been dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon and these dates have also been calibrated.
“The Formby footprint beds form one of the world’s largest known concentrations of prehistoric Holocene vertebrate tracks”, say the scientists in the paper. “The oldest beds, towards the south of Formby Point, are Mesolithic in age.” The Mesolithic was ancient cultural stage that existed between the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), with its chipped stone tools, and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), with its polished stone tools. In northern Europe it started around 8,000 BCE and lasted as late as 2,700 BCE in some regions, overlapping with the Neolithic.
Read the full paper here.
Saima Baig
I am a Chartered Environmentalist from the Royal Society for the Environment, UK and co-owner of DoLocal Digital Marketing Agency Ltd, with a Master of Environmental Management from Yale University, an MBA in Finance, and a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics. I am passionate about science, history and environment and love to create content on these topics.
