24/03/2022
Tanzania hosts several of the most significant paleoanthropological sites in the world. One of those sites is in Engare Sero. On the southern shore of Lake Natron you find the largest group of human footprints ever found in Africa.
Its discovery owes a great deal to the close by volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Maasai name for Mountain of God. The volcano is a place of pilgrimage for the pastoralist Maasai, who travel there to pray to their god Engai for rain, cattle, and children. Appropriately, the modern pilgrimage site also preserved the tracks of our human ancestors in the mud washed off Ol Doinyo Lengai’s flanks. The food prints were made in wet volcanic mudflow, which surface dried out quickly, preserving the prints in its cracked crust.
These footprints are probably made between 5,000 and 19,000 years ago, and carry evidence about humans’ features and behaviour in the so-called Late Pleistocene period. Based on the size of the prints and the stride lengths, the tracks suggest that around a dozen people, mostly women and children, were traveling across the mudflat together, striking toward the southwest.
In the context of modern ethnographic data, these tracks may indicate a division in forage labour based on s*x. It suggest that women were responsible for foraging for food and did so together in groups. This behaviour is thought to be similar to the way modern hunter-gatherer tribes, such as the Hadzabe, operate today.
