Ice Age Footprints Said Found in Outback

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -

Hundreds of human footprints dating back to the last Ice Age have been found in the remote Australian Outback, an official and media reported Thursday.

The 457 footprints found in Mungo National Park in western New South Wales state is the largest collection of its kind in the world and the oldest in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported.

www.lasvegassun.com...

An uncovering of this kind will help scientist investigate further the kind of life those people led during that time. If not for that kind of value, then there is a historical value placed upon them. They found 457 footprints from 19,000 to 23,000 years ago. That is an awesome find. With the children running between the footprints of their parents, I guess it already proves that children even back then were rambunctious.

it would also state to they seem that they were in health sick children usually dont usually run in circles and play when ill ..so i assume that they were also happy. i would love to know what they ate.. if they cooked..did they eat meat.. i wish we had a time machine i would love too see these things.. maybe even help us in the future as to what foods we ate before the supermarkets popped up and all the chems got dumped into the food lol wonder what they talked about.

brian

Hundreds footprints and no single picture (I also googled).

To bad.

Beautiful.



Revealed: the runners of 20,000BC
smh.com.au



Ice Age Footprints Said Found in Australia
www.washingtonpost.com...

Sanc'.

Originally posted by atomic811
it would also state to they seem that they were in health sick children usually dont usually run in circles and play when ill ..so i assume that they were also happy. i would love to know what they ate.. if they cooked..did they eat meat.. i wish we had a time machine i would love too see these things.. maybe even help us in the future as to what foods we ate before the supermarkets popped up and all the chems got dumped into the food lol wonder what they talked about.

brian

atomic, you're not the only one who wishes we had a time machine. with my love of history, i would love to go back and see how they lived and what their everyday lives were like.

Thank you for that Sanctum. Those pictures are beautiful.

sanctum,
thanks for the pictures. I guess I was to lazy, so I just use google picture search. (actually I did not have much time)

Originally posted by sanctum
Beautiful.

Revealed: the runners of 20,000BC
smh.com.au

Ice Age Footprints Said Found in Australia
www.washingtonpost.com...

Sanc'.

Now there's a Songline if I ever saw one

they must have had calloused feet

jeez, they look like hobbits feet. i wonder how were their hands...

Originally posted by atomic811
it would also state to they seem that they were in health sick children usually dont usually run in circles and play when ill ..so i assume that they were also happy.

Undoubtedly. And loved as well. And hated and all the emotions we have today. If you hauled one out of that time (16,000 years ago) and brought her here, you couldn't tell the difference between them and us (except for language, of course.)

i would love to know what they ate.. if they cooked..did they eat meat..

Certainly the did. These are Australian Aborigines from the ice age, and probably lived as they do today. The climate there was fairly warm, so they wouldn't have needed as much clothing as the Eskimos (for example) or Native Americans moving across the land bridge in Beringia would have needed.

They had the boomerang and other hunting sticks.

They'd arrived in Australia perhaps 50,000 years ago:
www.sheppardsoftware.com...

They used fire to manage plants and animals with controlled burning (as did the Native Americans... no, it was developed independantly and not borrowed from each other.) Depending on what lived there, they would have foraged for that. They lived as hunter-gatherers.

i wish we had a time machine i would love too see these things.. maybe even help us in the future as to what foods we ate before the supermarkets popped up and all the chems got dumped into the food

While not quite as varied as our diet today (and some of the things that they ate would have disgusted us... such as insect larvae) it was pretty varied. To quote from a site:

Aboriginal food and diets before European settlement
The Aborigines' food supplies before contact depended on the locality and season; in the interior of the country, food supplies were often scarce and the unpredictable water supplies affected survival. Animal foods that were hunted included mammals (eg, kangaroos, wallabies, possums, bandicoots, and bats), reptiles (eg, crocodiles, snakes, turtles, goannas, and other lizards), birds (eg, emus, parrots, bush turkeys, and ducks), and fish in rivers and along the coast. The eggs of many of these creatures were important. The men hunted large animals like kangaroos and emus. Insects such as honey ants and wild bees provided honey that was and still is popular in remote areas—this was an important carbohydrate source. Witchetty grubs are high in fat and have a composition similar to that of olive oil—these grubs are eaten raw or are lightly cooked in the ashes of a small open fire. The fatty parts of animals such as goannas were traditionally very popular after being cooked whole on red hot coals on the ground and turned occasionally so that the skin could be cooked; in northern Australia, food may be steamed while wrapped in leaves (or, today, in metal foil).

The seashore and river estuaries provided not only fish, sharks, stingrays, and dugongs, but also crabs, oysters, mussels, other shellfish, and snails. Inland waters were very important for fish, crustaceans, turtles, snakes, and birds and for plants such as water lilies.

The rich supply of plants the Aborigines ate included wild plums, apples, peaches, berries, figs, grapes, oranges, and desert bananas; the wild plum, Terminalia fernandiana, is the richest known natural source of vitamin C. There are also bush tomatoes and native vegetables such as carrots, onions, and bush potatoes. A variety of yams exists in different environments from the coast to the deserts. There is also a large range of nuts indigenous to Australia, including the macadamia nut and local chestnuts, walnuts, and almonds; these are most plentiful in Queensland (7). Seeds from bushes, such as mulga and acacia, and from grasses were painstakingly prepared and ground into a paste from which damper (a type of bread) was prepared by slow cooking or baking by using the coals of an open fire and eaten with other foods (8).
www.ajcn.org...

lol wonder what they talked about.

There's a good show on tv (can't seem to find the name, but it's on Discovery/History/PBS/Science channel that follows a native tribe's lifecycle. The people talk about pretty much what any farming group with no outside contact talk about -- gossip about each other, about marriages and other tribes, about pigs and farming, about magic, about forces causing good and bad luck, and so forth (their type of religion is shamanism; the oldest type of religion in the world, where there are spirits in the world and they must be appeased.)

Its refreshing to see something good for a change !!!
Good find and amazing pics !!

Good work ATS