850,000 Years Old. Found On A British Beach. Gone In A Fortnight.

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In May 2013, archaeologists working on the rapidly eroding coastline at Happisburgh in Norfolk made one of the most significant discoveries in British prehistory. Ancient human footprints. Pressed into estuary mud and preserved under hundreds of thousands of years of sediment. When the tide stripped back the overlying sand, they were exposed for the first time since the people who made them walked away.

They are around 850,000 to 950,000 years old. The oldest known human footprints ever found outside Africa. The prints are attributed, tentatively, to Homo antecessor, an early human species now extinct; the attribution is an inference from date and context rather than from direct remains. Analysis showed around 5 individuals, adults and children, moving south through an ancient river estuary. Researchers could make out the arch, the heel and the ball of the foot, and in some cases individual toe pads of people who lived nearly a million years ago.

Britain in 850,000 BC was unrecognisable. No North Sea. No English Channel. A vast fertile plain called Doggerland connected the British landmass to continental Europe. The river the group walked beside was an early precursor of the Thames, flowing northeast across land that is now submerged under forty metres of water. The prints were exposed by one tide and washed away by the next. The team had a fortnight to photograph, scan and record them. Then they were gone.