Happisburgh footprints

They were discovered in May 2013 in a newly uncovered sediment layer of the Cromer Forest Bed on a beach at Happisburgh in Norfolk, England, and carefully photographed in 3D before being destroyed by the tide shortly afterwards.

[1][2][3] Before the Happisburgh discovery, the oldest known footprints in Europe were the Ciampate del Diavolo tracks found at the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy, dated to around 350,000 years ago.

The footprints were discovered in May 2013 by Nicholas Ashton, curator at the British Museum, and Martin Bates, from Trinity St David's University in Wales, who were carrying out research as part of the Pathways to Ancient Britain (PAB) project.

[6] Analysis shows that the group of perhaps five individuals was walking in a southerly direction (upstream) along mudflats in the estuary of an early path of the River Thames that flowed into the sea farther north than it did when south-east Britain was joined to the European continent.

[6][9][11] A dissenting view has been presented by the geophysicist Rob Westaway, who proposed a younger date of towards the end of Marine Isotope Stage 15c, around 600,000 years ago.

[15] Happisburgh lay about 15 mi (24 km) further inland than it does today and was the site of an ancient estuary where the Bytham and Thames rivers converged to flow into what would then have been a maritime bay.

[6] When the footprints were made, the estuary occupied a grassy, open valley surrounded by pine forests, with a climate similar to that of modern southern Scandinavia.

It would have been inhabited by mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, Hippopotamus antiquus, giant deer, and bison, which were preyed upon by sabre-toothed cats, lions, wolves, and striped hyena.

Palaeontologists had believed that hominins of the period required a much warmer climate, but the inhabitants of prehistoric Happisburgh had adapted to the cold, suggesting that they had developed advanced methods of hunting, clothing, sheltering, and warming much earlier than previously thought.

Prehistoric discoveries have been noted since 1820 when fishermen trawling oyster beds offshore found their nets had brought up teeth, bones, horns, and antlers from elephants, rhinos, giant deer, and other extinct species.

An exceptionally high tide in February 1825 exposed more prehistoric remains when it swept away sediment that had buried an ancient landscape of fossilized tree stumps, animal bones, and fir cones.