Ancient Living Habits of 300,000 Year Old Ancestors Uncovered by Amazing Discovery of Oldest Human Prints

An amaz­ing dis­cov­ery has revealed the old­est known human prints in Europe, show­ing aston­ish­ing details about the ancient liv­ing habits of our ear­li­est ances­tors from over 300,000 years ago.

Dis­cov­ered in Ger­many, the amaz­ing find gives a rare look into how our old pre­de­ces­sors, the Hei­del­berg peo­ple (Homo hei­del­ber­gen­sis), actu­al­ly lived dur­ing the Low­er Pale­olith­ic era. The remark­able dis­cov­ery was made along with fos­silized ani­mal prints in an old lakebed at the Schönin­gen Pale­olith­ic site, a rich source of pre­his­toric arti­facts in north­west Germany.

Accord­ing to main archae­ol­o­gist Flavio Alta­mu­ra of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tübin­gen, “For the first time, we did a detailed study of the fos­sil prints from two sites in Schöningen…These prints, togeth­er with infor­ma­tion from sed­i­men­to­log­i­cal, archae­o­log­i­cal, pale­on­to­log­i­cal, and pale­ob­otan­i­cal stud­ies, give us insights into the old envi­ron­ment and the mam­mals that once lived in this area.”

Based on com­plete analy­ses, researchers rebuilt the pre­his­toric set­ting as a green lakeshore land­scape filled with birch and pine forests where ele­phants, rhi­nos and deer vis­it­ed the shores. “Depend­ing on the sea­son, plants, fruits, leaves, shoots, and mush­rooms were avail­able around the lake,” Alta­mu­ra explained. “Our find­ings con­firm that the extinct human species lived on lake or riv­er shores with shal­low water. This is also known from oth­er Low­er and Mid­dle Pleis­tocene sites with hominin prints.”

The team iden­ti­fied three Homo hei­del­ber­gen­sis prints, includ­ing prints of an adult and two young ones, giv­ing excit­ing clues that these were fam­i­lies liv­ing along the old lake. A stun­ning num­ber of well-kept wood­en tools and an unusu­al rhi­no print, the first of its kind found in Europe, offer more insight into the lives of these ancient peo­ples and the ani­mals they met.

This unmatched dis­cov­ery shows the pow­er of ich­nol­o­gy, the study of trace fos­sils, to rebuild high-qual­i­ty insights into the envi­ron­ments and lives of pre­his­toric humans, espe­cial­ly when com­bined with a mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary approach, accord­ing to the researchers. Togeth­er, these excit­ing clues paint an extra­or­di­nary pic­ture of life as it was for our dis­tant ances­tors 300,000 years ago along the shores of this lost old world.