800,000 years old Human footprints found in England oldest outside Africa

A team of scientists announced it had discovered human footprints in England for at least 800,000 years old, the oldest found outside Africa and first evidence of human life in northern Europe.

Team - composed of experts from the British Museum , the Museum of Natural History and the University of London discovered the tracks of up to five individuals in a former estuary in Happisburgh , on the British east coast .

Nick Ashton of the British Museum scientist said that the footprints are " a tangible link with our first human family ."

Scientists say that humans who left those footprints may have been associated with Homo ancestor , whose fossilized remains have been found in Spain and became extinct 800,000 years ago .

The finding was announced yesterday and published in the journal Plos One

It is " one of the most important discoveries , if not the most , that has been done on British shores ," Ashton told the BBC .

The footprints discovered at the site of Happisburgh were exposed during a low tide in the area where the restless sea wiped the sand that covered and the researchers saw. They took pictures of petrified sediment before the sea swallowed again.

With these photographs and a three-dimensional model trail scientists have worked possibly probably belonged to a family, adults and children.

The largest footprint would be an individual who would fit an actual number 42 and the researchers estimate , therefore, that would measure just over 1.70 meters , and the smallest, 90 inches.

Of about fifty prints identified , only a dozen were reasonably complete and only two fingers were visible in detail . The larger footprint would measure about 25 or 26 inches , another would be around 18 to 21 inches and could be a female, while the smaller would be between 14 and 16 inches. As for dating , archaeologists are now trying to determine their age , for now, are around 950,000 to 850,000 years old .

" At that time , Britain is still attached by land to mainland Europe and what is now Happisburgh have been a puddle several miles from the coast, deer, bison and rhinoceros ground," they said. The area would have provided those early humans edible plants , algae and shellfish , plus there could hunt . As for the climate , it would be colder than today, probably similar to what is now a southern Scandinavia .

Relations. Chris Stringer, a recognized expert on Neanderthals , the Museum of Natural History, believes that humans who left those footprints could be related to the population of Atapuerca ( Spain ) , in particular those whose remains have been preserved at the site of the Great Dolina also have more than 800,000 years and were baptized when the first fossils were discovered in 1994 as Homo antecessor .

In 2010 , the same team of researchers discovered Happisburg reservoir of stone tools, but now confirm that human footprints were actually in the region almost a million years ago, the BBC said Stringer .

" Last May, the sea had removed most of the sand on the beach ," Ashton recalled in his blog. He said investigators , who knew and had studied coastal rocks of Happisburgh , were surprised that day during a geophysical survey of the area : " In a small area of about 12 square meters there was a swarm of elongated holes , Martin ( Bates, colleague Ashton ) noted and said that the footprints seemed . "

"We recorded the footprints and came back a few days later with Sarah Duffy , University of York, to photograph using photogrammetry, a technique that uses multiple digital photos merged using special software . This is a great method, but the weather was not with heavy rain, the tide rising and fading daylight . were frozen at the end , we soaked , demoralized and not necessarily convinced , "says Ashton on his blog. However, " the results were surprising : for the first time we were able to identify authentic images and heels, arches and , in one case, fingers."

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