Oldest Human Footprint in History Discovered in Egypt

There is something ghostly and almost touchingly poetic about an ancient prehistoric footprint of one of our human ancestors -a shadowy reminder of the billions of our predecessors who lived, loved, explored, and suffered and gloried at the mystery of life and the cosmos during their short lives on the blue planet.

Egyptian archaeologists have found what they said could be the oldest human footprint in history in the country's western desert, the Arab country's antiquities' chief, Ahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on Monday.

Archaeologists found the footprint, imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a prehistoric site in Siwa, a desert oasis. Scientists are using carbon tests on plants found in the rock to determine its exact age.

"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.

Khaled Saad, the director of prehistory at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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Comments

[jack butler]

I believe it is Zahi Hawass, not Ahi. It would, incidentally, be a real pleasure to see archealogical news from the region which does not mention this spluttering bozo and information dictator.