In the soft clay, buried over almost two feet below the sandy beach on Calvert Island, BC, are the impressions of several ancient people’s feet.
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At least 29 footprints have been found, so far. And carbon dating, using pieces of wood embedded with the footprints, give the researchers a timeline of 13,000 years. The most ancient footprints found yet on the continent. The previous “earliest” was a single footprint in Chile and thought to be 14,000 years old.
The footprints are of at least two adults and one child, and appear to be gathered around a firepit, not walking in a path. The feet are bare:
The reason these footprints were unearthed and are such a rare find: researchers at the University of Victoria's Hakai Institute thought they would find ancient artifacts if they dug down to where they believed ice-age sediment lay.
"Fossilized footprints are rarely found in archaeological sites," McLaren said in an emailed statement. "This finding adds to the growing body of evidence that people who used watercraft were able to thrive on the Pacific Coast of Canada at the end of the last ice age,"
Where exactly is Calvert Island, you ask...www.env.gov.bc.ca/…
And a little Wiki info on it: en.wikipedia.org/...
In the Journal article, published in PLOS, March 28th, 2018:
"The footprints were impressed into soil just above the paleo-shoreline, possibly by a group of people disembarking from a watercraft and moving toward a drier central activity area,"
The researchers believe there to be more footprints in the area, but will leave them for future researchers who will hopefully have developed even better methods to explore and learn from.
www.cbc.ca/...