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78,000-year-old footprints from Neanderthal man, child and toddler discovered on beach in Portugal

Just before the first COVID lockdown in March 2020, Carlos Neto de Carvalho and his wife, Yilu Zhang, were walking along Monte Clérigo beach in southern Portugal. As the geologist and geographer couple scrambled over rocky outcrops and an old collapsed cliff, they stumbled on a series of ancient Neanderthal footprints.
“It was early in the morning of a sunny day, with perfect light for checking tracks,” Neto de Carvalho told Live Science in an email. But when they brought colleagues back to the site to take photos of the tracks, “we were almost trapped by the sudden rise of the tide and needed to swim and climb a 15-meter [49 feet] nearly vertical cliff with all our gear,” Neto de Carvalho said.
Their daring adventure paid off. The researchers ultimately discovered five trackways comprising 26 footprints at Monte Clérigo and, in turn, substantially increased experts’ understanding of Neanderthals’ activities along the Atlantic coast 78,000 years ago.
“The fossil record of hominin footprints, and especially the ones attributed to Neanderthals, is exceedingly rare,” Neto de Carvalho and colleagues wrote in a study published July 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, since Neanderthal footprints are nearly identical to humans’.
In this case, the footprints were identified as Neanderthal because modern humans weren’t in Europe at that time. Rather, evidence suggests that besides a few earlier failed attempts, Homo sapiens started leaving Africa around 50,000 years ago.
Only six sets of Neanderthal footprints had been discovered previously. Along with the Monte Clérigo tracks, the researchers have reported the new finding of a single footprint from Praia do Telheiro, also in southern Portugal, bringing the total number of Neanderthal trackways discovered in Europe to eight.
At Monte Clérigo, the ancient footprints were made near the shoreline in a coastal dune. Optically stimulated luminescence dating, which measures the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight, placed the footprints in the range of 83,000 to 73,000 years old. (Livescience)