When analyzing the various handprints, the team found that some of them appear 'unintentional' and relate to exploring the cave only, while others are more 'intentional' and suggest that social or symbolic activities took place within the inner chambers. (Isabella Salvador/ Fair Use ) The Analysis of Ancient Human Behavior The ancient humans crawled through a low tunnel of the cave. Secret Underground Cavern Thought by the Maya to be Portal to the Underworld.Homo erectus Skull Discovered in Central Java Provides More Evidence for Ancient Hominids in the Area.Ancient Human Fossil Finger Discovery Points to Earlier Eurasian Migration.Anatomical details in the footprints suggest that the explorers went bare-legged as they navigated this pathway. The researchers reported the first evidence of crawling in footprints from a low tunnel - a route that was taken to access the inner part of the cave. This suggests that young children were active group members during the late Stone Age, even when carrying out apparently dangerous activities. The team determined that five individuals, including two adults, an adolescent of about 11 years old, and two children of three and six years old, entered the cave barefoot and illuminated the way using wooden sticks. Shown here are three of the footprints, made on different surfaces within the cave. Researchers found a total of 180 ancient human footprints and traces that were made about 14,000 years ago in a cave in northern Italy. "Together, these approaches allowed us to construct a narrative of how the humans entered and exited the cave, and their activities once they were inside," Romano explains. They applied various modern dating methods, software that analyses the structure of the tracks, and different types of 3D modeling. To answer these questions, the multidisciplinary team studied 180 tracks from within the cave, including foot and handprints on the clay-rich floor. "Specifically, we set out to discover how many people entered the cave, whether they explored as individuals or as a group, their age, gender and what kind of route they took once inside the cave." "In our study, we wanted to see how ancient humans explored this fascinating cave system ," says first author Marco Romano, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. ![]() The corridor - known as Corridoio delle Impronte - within the cave where the researchers analyzed some of the prints of ancient humans. (Isabella Salvador/ Fair Use ) In the current study, promoted by the Archaeological Heritage Office of Liguria, researchers from Italy, Argentina, and South Africa used multiple approaches to analyze the human traces and identified for the first time crawling behaviors from around 14,000 years ago. The cave of Bàsura at Toirano and its human and animal fossil traces have been known since the 1950s, with the first studies conducted by Italian archaeologist Virginia Chiappella. Evidence of crawling in an Italian cave system sheds new light on late Stone Age human behavior in groups, especially when exploring new grounds, says a study published today in eLife.
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