Egypt footprint “could be the oldest”

A very exciting discovery in Egypt: Human footprints that go back about 2 million years or even more. Some scholars said, the footprints could even go back more than 3 million years, which makes them the “oldest traces of humans” on the planet. The story below is from the BBC, clipped by JohnWaterman at Clipmarks web site.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Archaeologists in Egypt say they have discovered what might be the oldest human footprint ever found The outline was found imprinted in mud, which has since turned to stone, at Siwa oasis in the western desert. “This could go back about two million years,” antiquities council chief Zahi Hawass was quoted by Reuters as saying. However Khaled Saad, director of pre-history at the council, said it could be older still, and pre-date Ethiopia’s 3m-year-old skeleton, Lucy. Lucy, discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia, is an extinct Australopithecus afarensis hominid estimated to be 3.2 million years old. “It could be the most important discovery in Egypt,” Mr Hawass said. Until now the earliest evidence of human activity found in Egypt, most famous for the era of the pharaohs, dates from about 200,000 years ago.