Did Eve make footprints in the sand 117,000 years ago?
Washington (Reuters) – A set of 117,000-year-old footprints found in South Africa is possible evidence of a woman who could be the common ancestor of all modern humans, the fossils’ discoverers said yesterday. Made by bare feet in wet sand after a rainstorm, the prints are an important clue to a period with a scarce fossil record: 100,000 to 300,000 years ago, when modern humans emerged. “These were made by a person who looked anatomically just like us,” said Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist who announced the discovery at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington, where a fibreglass cast of the footprints was displayed. Mr Berger and David Roberts, a South African geologist who found the fossils nearly two years ago, referred to the person who made the prints as “she”, based on the small size of the feet, but acknowledged that it could have been a small man or a child. If the prints were made by a female, she could be the anthropological “Eve”, a hypothetical
