Scientists Chance Upon 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints On Moroccan Beach

Some 90,000 years ago, a group of humans walked across a sandy beach in the city of Larache on Morocco’s northwest coast. Remarkably, archaeologists have found a large number of intact footprints from the journey. These represent the oldest human prints found in the region and among the earliest attributed to Homo sapiens worldwide.

Footprints represent moments frozen in time that can reveal fascinating details on everything from stature, age and body mass to speed, gait and social behavior. After studying 85 of the most well-preserved fossilized prints found in Larache, the international team of researchers concluded they were made by at least five people, including children, an adolescent and adults. They detail their findings in a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This is a fascinating discovery from a time and place where no fossil human footprint sites were previously known,” evolutionary biologist Kevin Hatala, a Chatham University professor who was not involved with the research, said in an email.

Scientists stumbled upon the footprints in 2022. While on a field mission studying boulders on a rocky beach, they noticed an indentation in the ground, and closer inspection revealed more of them. In the study, they describe how they identified the markings as footprints based on anatomical characteristics reflective of human feet, such as a rounded heel, a plantar arch and relatively short toes. And they detail how they dated the rock containing the footprints using optically stimulated luminescence, a cutting-edge technique that measures when materials such as grains of sand last absorbed sunlight.

Morocco is also home to the Jebel Irhoud archaeological site, where scientists discovered the earliest known fossilized remains of homo sapiens, dating back 300,000 years. The oldest known homo sapiens footprints, found in South Africa, date back 153,000 years.

The Larache researchers believe their footprints survived many millenia, at least in part, because they’re located in a spot where a large boulder partially protects them from wave swells that would erode the site over time.

The last 90,000 years have seen around 78 feet of sediment deposited above the level of the footprints, Mouncef Sedrati, a life sciences professor at France’s University of South Brittany and a co-author of the study, said in an interview.

“It is conceivable that in recent years, with the frequent occurrence of storms, the cliff, of which the layer of footprints constitutes the current base, started to erode,” Sedrati said. “Consequently, the rocky platform began to peel away layer by layer until it reached its present level, revealing the footprints in the process.”

It’s unknown what, exactly, the ancient humans were doing on the beach. They could have just been passing through along two trails. But since our Pleistocene predecessors were hunter-gatherers, and past studies have shown the importance of coastal regions for their resource gathering, they likely were foraging for food. The orientation of their footprints perpendicular to the coastline suggests a search for a marine meal.

“It adds to other evidence that the Middle Stone Age inhabitants of Morocco were visiting the coast, presumably in search of food and other items,” Louise Humphrey, a bioarchaelogist with London’s Natural History Museum who was not part of the research team, said in an email.

The Larache researchers hypothesize that the children ambling along the beach 90,000 years ago may have aided in that search, though further studies will be needed to validate this theory.

“What is particularly exciting about this discovery is the entire paleontological and paleoanthropological potential it provides,” Sedrati said. “We have only examined the best-preserved 85 footprints. Dozens more human and potentially animal prints remain to be explored and studied.”