Photographs of what may be 13,000-year-old human footprints were taken on the Canadian Pacific coast and published March 28 in the open-access journal Plos One.
Photographs of at least 29 footprints were taken on British Columbia's Calvert Island, of what appear to be from two adults and a child, and published in the report by by Duncan McLaren and colleagues from the Hakai Institute and University of Victoria, Canada.
"Fossilized footprints are rarely found in archaeological sites, although are (known) from coastal areas where they are sometimes exposed by erosion," McLaren wrote in an email, according to CNN.
Researchers believe that during the last ice age, early humans migrated from Asia to North America via a land bridge connecting the two continents. The eastern end of the bridge is believed to end on the west coast of British Columbia.
The last ice age ended approximately 11,700 years ago, which would correlate to the estimated age of the footprints, determined via radiocarbon dating.
"This article details the discovery of footprints on the west coast of Canada with associated radiocarbon dates of 13,000 years before present," McLaren said, Science Daily reported. "This finding provides evidence of the seafaring people who inhabited this area during the tail end of the last major ice age."
The discovery was a surprise to the researchers, who were searching for plant fossils.
After finding the first footprint, they changed the direction of their research, which led to the discovery of the additional 28 footprints.
The impressions, which clearly showed heels and arches, equated to a woman's size 8-9, a junior's size 8 and a woman's size 3 by modern standards, CNN reported.
"Primarily the three different sizes of footprints found conjures up the image of a nuclear family or small group of people using the area," McLaren wrote in the study. "Most of the footprints face inland ... and they may represent a place where people were disembarking from watercraft before moving to a drier area."
The earliest human footprints were discovered in Africa, dating back 3.6 million years ago. But the location of this latest find makes it a rarity.
"These tracks are faint, but the size, shape and number of tracks are convincing," Neil Thomas Roach of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University told CNN.
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