Walk Through Eden

Three footprints left in a rain-soaked sand dune by a woman or small man who scientists say lived at the dawn of the human experience about 117,000 years ago have been discovered near the shore of a coastal lagoon in South Africa.

The 8-1/2-inch tracks are the oldest ever found of modern humans, paleoanthropologist Lee R. Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg said Thursday.

“This was a lady or a small man, an individual who walked down toward the lagoon after a storm,” Berger told reporters at a news conference at the at the National Geographic Society. “You can see where each toe dug into the sand, just like you get that icky feeling when you walk through sand.”

He said the tracks point to additional footprints in the same rock and to promising research into the lives of anatomically modern human beings who lived only centuries before modern human thought began.

“They looked just like us, but they didn’t think like us,” said Berger, 31.

He said he thought the chances “real good” that the individual who plodded down the side of the dune, leaving his or her size 7s in the mud, has descendants living on earth today.

However, he warned against speculation that this was “Eve,” the hypothetical African woman from whom geneticists say all modern humans descended.

“It’s the right continent and within a hundred thousand years of when ‘Eve’ lived, but that’s about all we can say,” he said.

Berger said fossil evidence of human activity in Africa around the time anatomically modern humans first appeared is plentiful, but actual bones or tracks of humans from the period is even rarer than those of much more ancient pre-human creatures.

“This is the rarest of the rare,” he said. “There are far more human tracks on the moon than have been found from this period in Africa.”

Berger said the humans who lived and hunted beside what is now called Langebaan Lagoon in South Africa’s West Coast National Park pre-dated by a few thousand years the earliest evidence of “symbolic” human thinking.

“They were incredibly complex beings,” he said, “but they probably didn’t have the ability to engage in symbolic thought, to be concerned about their mortality or the mortality of others. They would not have buried their dead or created permanent artwork. These humans had a confined tool kit. They were very limited in their ability to use the world.

“They weren’t able to look at the world and say I need something new,” he said. “But they were beginning to test the borders of symbolic thinking.”

They did have stone tools, including spear points and serrated stone knives, he said. In addition to the tracks, Berger’s team displayed artifacts and the horns - 9 feet across - of a giant buffalo the beings were known to hunt.

“To show you what these people were up against, this thing made a cape buffalo look like a mouse,” he said.

Conditions had to be just right for the tracks to be preserved, said geologist David Roberts, the person who actually discovered them, about two years ago.

Concerned that the tracks were in danger of almost immediate destruction by erosion, Berger said he made “an emergency” telephone call to the National Geographic Society for financial support to make casts.

Although the tracks have been treated with epoxy to protect them from the elements, they cannot be moved because the sandstone in which they were found is so brittle, Roberts said.

Berger, who graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1988, got his doctorate from the University of Witwatersrand, where he now teaches.