Previously reported, with limited discussion on the Palanth Human Evolutionary Biology board
"Ice age footprints" CLICK HERE, an interesting story from
Time South Pacific magazine Sunday, March 19, 2006, recounts a narrative of discovery of the 460 human footprints found in 2003 and announced last December.
Sunday, Mar. 19, 2006
Secrets of the Dunes
EXCLUSIVE: At Australia's WIllandra Lakes, TIME’s Lisa Clausen Visits the site of the world's largest repository of ice-age human footprints
They were in the wrong place, but Steve Webb's archaeology class decided to stay anyway. A colleague had mistakenly taken them to a site they'd never visited before, a nondescript-looking claypan lost among the pale dunes in the Willandra Lakes region of far western New South Wales. Luckily, Webb thought it would still make good practice fieldwork for his Aboriginal students after a week of classes in the nearby town of Mildura. He was walking behind one of them, 26-year-old Mary Pappin Jr., when she called out that she'd seen something. What she'd spotted on the wind-blown surface looked like a footprint. "We'd all been walking over it," her mother Mary says proudly. "But that little one saw it."
What she'd chanced upon is still hard to believe - not only the first Ice Age fossilized human footprints found in Australia, but the largest collection ever found anywhere. "You just don't get this sort of archaeological signature," says Michael Westaway, executive officer of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. "This is a story, really, for everybody." Today the prints look as sharp as if their makers had just hurried over the top of the nearest dune. "Almost as good as a footprint in wet sand," Webb says. Since the 2003 find, which was announced last December, his team has uncovered around 460 human prints crisscrossing the site like the traces of a peak-hour crowd, many deeply impressed in the sediment, clearly showing where mud once squished between toes. From their size and the distance between them, Webb and his team have formed a rough picture of 23 individuals who traversed what would have been a wet landscape between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. A child wanders alone, a little way off from a group. Intersecting their paths is a one-legged man whose confident pace gives no clue as to how he propelled himself, and four tall men running fast, their heels skidding as they sped - were they hunters or prey?
Today the landscape they knew looks empty but for lonely turrets of sediment eaten away by the weather and dunes shimmering under a scalding sky. Parched flocks of galahs drift on the hot wind. Yet the Willandra Lakes region, which in 1981 became a 240,000-hectare World Heritage Area, has in the past 30 years yielded astounding archaeological treasures. In 1968 the dunes surrendered Mungo Lady, the skeletal remains of a young woman whose burial site remains the oldest evidence of cremation ever found. The ocher-covered bones of the world's oldest known ritual burial, Mungo Man, were discovered in 1974, and since then more than 150 human burials - most of them more than 10,000 years old - have been unearthed, as well as shell-strewn middens, hearths and the bones of extinct megafauna. Webb, professor of Australian Studies at Bond University, has studied the area for more than 20 years. "I've traveled all over Australia," he says, "and I don't know of anywhere that even comes up to the ankles of this place.".....(more)
FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HEREEspecially informative are paragraphs near the end describing future plans for the preservation of the footprints, possible further excavation, as well as some innovative measures taken to protect the footprints from erosion in the short-term.
A group of Aboriginal women sit filling dozens of knee-high stockings with hot sand. Barefoot, they then move carefully over the dazzlingly white claypan, its surface cracked like china and scattered with cinnamon-colored sand, placing a stocking on each print to shield it from the weather.
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