The Happisburgh footprints
A tide exposes human footprints on a Norfolk beach — the oldest outside Africa, and gone within a fortnight.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
In May 2013, erosion on the Norfolk coast at Happisburgh exposed a surface of estuary mud carrying dozens of hominin footprints, made by a group of perhaps five including children walking south along a river that would become the Thames. They date to between about 950,000 and 850,000 years ago — the oldest known hominin footprints outside Africa. The sea destroyed them within two weeks; they survive as photogrammetric models. Britain at the time was joined to the continent and was near the northern limit of habitable range.