“Laetoli… is an exceptional locality with far better preserved footprint tracks [than on Crete],” says geophysicist Uwe Kirscher, a Curtin University research fellow who led an effort to date the Crete footprints. “You would always want something like [Laetoli]. But you see how special the conditions have to be for footprints to be preserved for such a long time.”
The incredibly rare Laetoli tracks show short strides and a bent-over gait, hallmarks of upright walking long before hominins like Homo sapiens appeared. The only known early human in the region at that time was Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as Lucy whose skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia. Other Au. afarensis fossils were found nearby the Laetoli tracks and within the same sediment layer, confirming that the species lived in the area when the footprints were made.
The imprints at Laetoli are widely accepted as the oldest known early-human footprints, but a more recent discovery on the Mediterranean island of Crete complicates the picture. In 2002, a vacationing paleontologist first spotted a set of fossilized footprints near the village of Trachilos that could rewrite humanity’s timeline.
The Crete tracks, more than 50 impressions preserved in fossilized beach sediments, were initially dated to about 5.7 million years ago. However, Kirscher and his team’s more recent analysis, published in 2021, pushed the estimate back even further, to roughly 6.05 million years ago. If accurate, this would make the tracks approximately 2.5 million years older than the Laetoli trail.
The source, or sources, of the footprints are even less clear. The tracks show features resembling a human-like foot with forward-facing toes, an asymmetrical sole and no evidence of claws. This suggests the footprints could belong to an early hominin who was walking upright much earlier than our known ancestors in Africa. It’s possible that species was Graecopithecus freybergi, a proposed hominin whose fossils have been found in Greece and dated to more than 7 million years old.
“If the footprints are 6 [million years old] (I think we will have an answer there soon), and if they are from a hominin (much more speculative, but there are arguments), it would mean that bipedal hominin [were] present in Europe much earlier than previously thought,” Kirscher says. “One way of interpreting this would be to argue (as some people do)… that much more of the human evolution, like the transition to hominins, happened not in Africa but in Europe.”
Although he cautions that more data are needed, the Crete footprints are still significant. “It shows that the evolution of bipedalism was certainly more complex” than we once believed, Kirscher says.
From Ancient Ancestors to Modern Humans
The oldest undisputed evidence of hominins walking like we do today can be found in Ileret, Kenya. A 2024 analysis of trackways there reveal two early human species walked the same lakeshore around 1.5 million years ago. The discovery shows that Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei likely coexisted in the same environment, each leaving distinct footprints that hint at differences in anatomy, gait and behavior.
As for our direct ancestors, paleontologists determined the oldest known Homo sapiens footprints are within South Africa’s Garden Route National Park in 2023. Dated to about 153,000 years ago and preserved in coastal sand dunes, the tracks reveal details of stride, posture and body size, offering a rare glimpse of our human ancestors in motion. The site, part of a cluster of well-preserved Pleistocene trackways on the Cape coast, underscores the region’s importance as an early hub of human activity.
“The White Sands tracks are the oldest obvious and well-dated evidence for humans in the Americas,” says Vance Holliday, an archaeologist, geologist and University of Arizona professor emeritus. “And that dating places the tracks between 23,000 and 21,000 years old. They are solidly ‘ice age.’”
Together, these sites trace the long arc of human movement across continents, revealing not just where our early ancestors lived, but also how they walked civilization into being.
Every footprint discovery sits at the intersection of geology, biology and chance. Determining who, or what, made an ancient track requires both dating precision and anatomical interpretation, two things that rarely align perfectly. Still, when combined with fossils, ancient tools and DNA, preserved steps become powerful clues in reconstructing ancestral lives.
“Human tracks provide an extra dimension for archaeologists, showing us where and how people moved around, step by step,” Holliday says. “We can literally follow in their tracks.”
Perhaps, as Machado suggested, the path to uncovering the world’s oldest footprints is not one clear trail but a mosaic of steps. With each new discovery, we get a little further in our understanding of where and when humanity began to walk.
