Traces of crawling in Italian cave give clues

[Still Waters]

Evidence of crawling in an Italian cave system sheds new light on how late Stone Age humans behaved as a group, especially when exploring new grounds, says a study published today in eLife.

The cave of Bàsura at Toirano and its human and animal fossil traces have been known since the 1950s, with the first studies conducted by Italian archaeologist Virginia Chiappella. In the current study, promoted by the Archaeological Heritage Office of Liguria, researchers from Italy, Argentina and South Africa used multiple approaches to analyse the human traces and identified for the first time crawling behaviours from around 14,000 years ago.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-italian-cave-clues-ancient-humans.html

[Jon the frog]

To see the traces of people 14000 ago going barefoot in the blackness is so marvelous and intriguing. What they where thinking going down there, was it for fun ? To find a water source, a passage to another world ? We will probably never know. It's practically poetic thinking about that.