Geo-Ocean, Univ Bretagne Sud, Univ Brest, CNRS, Ifremer, UMR6538, F- 56000, Vannes, France.
Departamento de Ciencias de la Tierra, Facultad de Ciencias Experimentales, Universidad de Huelva, Campus de El Carmen, Huelva, Spain.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jan 23;14(1):1962. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-52344-5.
Footprints represent a relevant vestige providing direct information on the biology, locomotion, and behaviour of the individuals who left them. However, the spatiotemporal distribution of hominin footprints is heterogeneous, particularly in North Africa, where no footprint sites were known before the Holocene. This region is important in the evolution of hominins. It notably includes the earliest currently known Homo sapiens (Jebel Irhoud) and the oldest and richest African Middle Stone Age hominin sites. In this fragmented ichnological record, we report the discovery of 85 human footprints on a Late Pleistocene now indurated beach surface of about 2800 m at Larache (Northwest coast of Morocco). The wide range of sizes of the footprints suggests that several individuals from different age groups made the tracks while moving landward and seaward across a semi-dissipative bar-trough sandy beach foreshore. A geological investigation and an optically stimulated luminescence dating of a rock sample extracted from the tracksite places this hominin footprint surface at 90.3 ± 7.6 ka (MIS 5, Late Pleistocene). The Larache footprints are, therefore, the oldest attributed to Homo sapiens in Northern Africa and the Southern Mediterranean.
足迹是一种重要的遗迹，它能为我们提供有关留下足迹的个体的生物学、运动方式和行为的直接信息。然而，人类足迹的时空分布是不均匀的，特别是在北非地区，在全新世之前，那里没有已知的足迹遗址。这个地区在人类的进化中非常重要。它包括了最早的已知智人（杰贝尔·伊罗）以及最古老和最丰富的非洲中石器时代人类遗址。在这个零散的足迹记录中，我们报告了在摩洛哥西北部拉腊什（Larache）一个大约 2800 米高的晚更新世现在已经硬结的海滩表面上发现了 85 个人类足迹。足迹的大小范围很广，这表明有几个来自不同年龄组的个体在沿着半消散的沙洲沙滩前滨向陆地和海洋移动时留下了这些足迹。对从足迹遗址中提取的岩石样本进行地质调查和光释光测年表明，这个人类足迹表面的年代为 90.3±7.6 ka（MIS 5，晚更新世）。因此，拉腊什足迹是北非和南地中海地区最早被归因于智人的足迹。
