
In an open birch and pine forest with an understory of grasses sits a lake, a few kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. On its muddy shores, herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even-toed ungulates gather to drink or bathe. In the midst of this scenery stands a small family of -Heidelberg people,- a species of human long since extinct.
-This is what it might have looked like at Schöningen in Lower Saxony 300,000 years ago,- explains the lead author of the newly published study, Dr. Flavio Altamura, a fellow at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen (SHEP), and he continues, -For the first time, we conducted a detailed investigation of the fossil footprints from two sites in Schöningen. These tracks, together with information from sedimentological, archaeological, paleontological, and paleobotanical analyses, provide us with insights into the paleoenvironment and the mammals that once lived in this area. Among the prints are three tracks that match hominin footprints - with an age of about 300,000 years, they are the oldest human tracks known from Germany and were most likely left by Homo heidelbergensis.-

In addition to the human tracks, the team analyzed a series of elephant tracks attributable to the extinct species Palaeoloxodon antiquus - an elephant with straight tusks that was the largest land animal at the time and whose adult bulls reached a body weight of up to 13 tons. -The elephant tracks we discovered at Schöningen reach an impressive length of 55 centimeters. In some cases, we also found wood fragments in the prints that were pushed into the - at that time still soft - soil by the animals,- explains Dr. Jordi Serangeli, excavation supervisor at Schöningen, and he adds, -There is also one track from a rhinoceros - Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis or Stephanorhinus hemitoechus - which is the first footprint of either of these Pleistocene species ever found in Europe.-
Press release of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, the University of Tübingen and the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture

Flavio Altamura, Jens Lehmann, Bárbara Rodríguez-Ãlvarez, Brigitte Urban, Thijs van Kolfschoten, Ivo Verheijen, Nicholas J. Conard, Jordi Serangeli 2023. Fossil footprints at the late Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen : a new line of research to reconstruct animal and hominin paleoecology. Quaternary Science Reviews. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108094
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