The Full Story
In May 2013, the sea pulled back the sand on a beach in Norfolk.
Under it lay a slab of ancient estuary mud, hardened almost to rock. Pressed into its surface were footprints.
Human footprints. Made between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago.
The oldest human footprints ever found outside Africa.
This was Happisburgh, on the north Norfolk coast. The prints had been left by a small group, perhaps 5 people, adults and children, walking south beside a river that has long since vanished.
Britain was not yet an island. A bridge of fertile plain still joined it to the continent. These people walked across it nearly a million years before the Romans.
No bones were found. Nobody can say for certain who they were. They may have belonged to an early human species called Homo antecessor, but the prints alone cannot prove it.
What is certain is that they were here. People stood on this ground, and walked, and were gone, hundreds of thousands of years before any written history began.
The same sea that uncovered the prints was already washing them away. The archaeologists had a fortnight.
Between the tides they photographed and scanned every print, building an exact record in 3D. Then the sea took the originals.
The prints are gone. The record made in those 14 days survives.
Before Happisburgh, the oldest sign of people in Britain lay at Pakefield in Suffolk, around 700,000 years old. In a single fortnight, before the tide could close the page, Happisburgh pushed the human story on these islands back by nearly a quarter of a million years.
Why This Matters
The history of these islands does not begin with the Romans, or with kings, or with anyone whose name we know. It begins with a handful of people, adults and children together, walking across a muddy estuary in what is now Norfolk, almost a million years ago. The Happisburgh footprints are the oldest human footprints anywhere outside Africa, and they make the point that British history runs unimaginably deeper than any nation, crown or empire. They also teach something about how we know the past. There were no bones and no certainty, only marks in the mud and the honesty to say we think rather than we know. And they are a warning. The record was saved in 14 days flat before the sea destroyed it. The deep history of Britain is washing off our shores faster than it can be recorded.
Key Facts
- ✓The footprints were uncovered by the tide at Happisburgh, Norfolk, in May 2013, and the findings were announced on 7 February 2014 (Wikipedia; Natural History Museum)
- ✓They date to roughly 850,000 to 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest known human footprints outside Africa (Wikipedia; Natural History Museum)
- ✓About 5 individuals, adults and children, left the prints while walking beside an ancient river, at a time when Britain was still joined to continental Europe by land (Wikipedia; Current Archaeology)
- ✓The prints were recorded with photography and 3D scanning over about 14 days before the sea destroyed them; the physical prints no longer survive, only the record (Natural History Museum; Wikipedia)
- ✓Before Happisburgh, the oldest evidence of humans in Britain came from Pakefield, Suffolk, at around 700,000 years old (Wikipedia; Current Archaeology)
- ⚠No bones were found with the prints, so the species cannot be proven. They are tentatively linked to Homo antecessor. The dates come from stratigraphy, the magnetic record in the sediments and fossil plants and animals, not from direct dating of the prints, so they are given as a range.