Bigfoot's 20,000-year-old walkabout

[UM-Bot]

A hunter sprints along the swampy shore of the Willandra Lakes, New South Wales, Australia. Tall and powerfully built, he quickly accelerates to 12mph, his heels slipping slightly in the mud, silty soil squishing between his toes as he pursues his prey.

To the east, four men run together, the tallest shortening his stride to a jog to allow his companions to keep pace. A child drags its feet, forcing the adult he is with to slow down, and an adolescent wanders away from the path.

View: Full Article | Source: Times Online

[slurpygloop]

A hunter sprints along the swampy shore of the Willandra Lakes, New South Wales, Australia. Tall and powerfully built, he quickly accelerates to 12mph, his heels slipping slightly in the mud, silty soil squishing between his toes as he pursues his prey. To the east, four men run together, the tallest shortening his stride to a jog to allow his companions to keep pace. A child drags its feet, forcing the adult he is with to slow down, and an adolescent wanders away from the path. The year is 20,000BC, the height of the last Ice Age. They were small steps for man, but a huge leap for the history of mankind: by a quirk of geology, the footprints these eight hunter-gatherers left have been preserved perfectly, fossilised as the clay soil dried and was buried under layers of sediment. In 2003, another group was walking along the same ground, Aborigines on an archeology course led by Steve Webb, of Bond University, Queensland. They weren’t supposed to be there – a colleague had taken them to the dull-looking clay pan by mistake – but Webb thought it would still make good fieldwork practice for his students. More than 150 Ice Age human burials had been unearthed in the area, as well as the bones of now-extinct animals. However, after years of watching scientists take artefacts and remains away to museums and universities elsewhere, the elders of local tribes had placed a moratorium on excavations.

Webb and his colleagues had only recently won back their trust. “Is this a footprint?” asked Mary Pappin Jr, a 26-year-old member of the local Mutthi Mutthi tribe. “Christ, it is,” replied Webb. They quickly spotted two or three more prints, which had been exposed as the wind eroded the dunes. Painstaking excavation has since revealed 450 more, as well as what appear to be spear holes in the ground and the tracks of kangaroos and emus. This is perhaps only an eighth of the total, the rest still covered by dunes, but it is already the largest collection of Ice Age footprints discovered anywhere in the world, laden with information about the group’s physiology, hunting tactics and social behaviour. “It’s really quite a remarkable find,” said Matthew Cupper, an archeologist at the University of Melbourne who has been studying the prints. “It’s a little snapshot in time. The possibilities are endless in terms of getting a window into past Aboriginal society.”

View: Full Article | Source: Times Online

Just goes to show you the potential of what's still out there that we aren't aware of. Makes the depressing state of affairs we live in today still seem fresh and exciting!!

[greywolf]

really interesting.