Ice age footprints

[Stroud-Mangos]

Rather interesting story on ca. 20 ka human footprints from inland Australia:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20051219/footprint_arc.html

The original source is:

Steve Webb, Matthew L Cupper and Richard Robins. (in press, corrected proof online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484).
Pleistocene human footprints from the Willandra Lakes, southeastern Australia. Journal of Human Evolution.

Megan Stroud-Mangos

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Rather interesting story on ca. 20 ka human footprints from inland Australia:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20051219/footprint_arc.html

The original source is:

Steve Webb, Matthew L Cupper and Richard Robins. (in press, corrected proof online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484).
Pleistocene human footprints from the Willandra Lakes, southeastern Australia. Journal of Human Evolution.

Megan Stroud-Mangos

Welcome to the PALANTH Forum, and thanks for bringing this up. Like a number of other topics that should be (have been) mentioned, it has fallen through the Holidays cracks.

This said, the actual Webb & al. paper you refer to is definitely more informative than what the hyped up Discovery coverage has come up with. The comment I liked most in the latter is from Cupper, one of the investigators/co-authors: "It's a little snapshot in time"! But one way or the other, it is definitely a more realistic/convincing demonstration than what has recently be reported HERE from the Puebla/Valsequillo area

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[trehinp]

Jacques,

The French magasine "Sciences Humaines publishes in its february 2006 an article entitles "Peuplement de l'Amérique: surprenantes découvertes" in which there is a reference to those early footprints. I just checked the website (http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/exhibit.asp?id=3616&tip=1) and it is providing some additional info about this great discovery.

The rest of the article is also quite interesting.

Yours sincerely.

Paul

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Jacques,

The French magasine "Sciences Humaines publishes in its february 2006 an article entitles "Peuplement de l'Amérique: surprenantes découvertes" in which there is a reference to those early footprints. I just checked the website (http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/exhibit.asp?id=3616&tip=1) and it is providing some additional info about this great discovery.

The rest of the article is also quite interesting.

Yours sincerely.

Paul

Paul,

I would certainly like to get the French viewpoint on this story, but I doubt very much that Sciences Humaines has had access to much more than what has already been widely circulated in the media, and already mentioned in the Forum (HERE).

All we can really say at this time is that Gonzalez & al. owe us (i.e., the palaeoanthropologcal community ) a real paper on their finds/dates together with a well articulated response to the paper published in Nature by Renne & al.

Mention has been made that a formal response would appear in February, in Quaternary Science Reviews. As of this morning, the journal’s “Articles in Press” listing showed no sign of such a response. Perhaps an indication that the peer review process takes longer than expected.

Jacques