A couple walking their dog along a cliff-faced Scottish coast after a heavy storm discovered a series of unusual tracks in the damp ground that looked like ancient human or animal footprints.
Their discovery sparked an archaeological race against time to document and study the prints before they disappeared into the waves.
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On the beach at Lunan Bay in eastern Scotland, locals Ivor Campbell and Jenny Snedden and their dogs Ziggy and Juno discovered a new layer of clay that looked like a print in a storm-damaged dune. They notified Aberdeenshire Council’s archaeologist Bruce Mann, who brought in Britton and her team to excavate the newly discovered site before it was lost forever.
A team of archaeologists scrambled to document the ruins as wind gusts of up to 55 mph (88.5 kph) eroded them with each storm surge. They recorded images of the ruins using drones, cameras, and later 3D modeling software in the lab. They also used plaster to make molds of well-preserved prints made by barefoot humans and several animals, including a red deer (Cervus elaphus) and a roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), the statement said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in Scotland,” Britton said. “I knew right away that this was something special.”
Archaeologists found a layer of charred plant remains beneath the print. They carbon-dated the plant and estimated it to be 2,000 years old, during the Late Iron Age.
“The Late Iron Age date is consistent with what we know about the rich archeology of the nearby Runan Valley,” Gordon Noble, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in a statement. “It’s very exciting to think that these prints were made by people over the centuries, around the time of the Roman invasion of Scotland and up to the emergence of the Picts.”
“This now-sandy beach tells us that it was once a muddy estuary, and that humans probably used this environment to hunt deer and forage for wild plant food,” William Mills, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in a statement.
Britton and her team spent two days excavating the site and documenting as much as they could. When I returned a week later, the traces had completely disappeared.
“The footprints, which represent the minutes-long actions of people thousands of years ago, were destroyed within days,” Britton said.
The Lunan Bay site is unique in Scotland, but “what this means for us now is that there could potentially be other sites like this,” Britton said.
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Laura Goegel
archeology editor
The discovery of this footprint is interesting. Because railroad tracks can reveal a lot about the people who left footprints, including their approximate weight, height, age, how fast they walked, and whether they were wearing shoes. It can even reveal behavior. For example, footprints left in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park are likely left by Ice Age children who jumped into muddy puddles. In Portugal, 78,000-year-old footprints left by Neanderthals, some of which overlapped with those of large mammals, suggest that men, children, and infants foraged for food, ambush-hunted, and stalked prey.
We look forward to further analysis of these footprints from Scotland and what they can tell us about the Iron Age people who lived there.
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