RT Journal Article
T1 A Late Pleistocene hominin footprint site on the North African coast of Morocco
A1 Sedrati, Mouncef
A1 Morales González, Juan Antonio
A1 Mayoral Alfaro, Eduardo
A1 Rivera Silva, Jorge
AB Footprints represent a relevant vestige providing direct information on the biology, locomotion, and behaviour of the individuals who left them. However, the spatiotemporal distribution of hominin footprints is heterogeneous, particularly in North Africa, where no footprint sites were known before the Holocene. This region is important in the evolution of hominins. It notably includes the earliest currently known Homo sapiens (Jebel Irhoud) and the oldest and richest African Middle Stone Age hominin sites. In this fragmented ichnological record, we report the discovery of 85 human footprints on a Late Pleistocene now indurated beach surface of about 2800 m2 at Larache (Northwest coast of Morocco). The wide range of sizes of the footprints suggests that several individuals from different age groups made the tracks while moving landward and seaward across a semi-dissipative bar-trough sandy beach foreshore. A geological investigation and an optically stimulated luminescence dating of a rock sample extracted from the tracksite places this hominin footprint surface at 90.3 ± 7.6 ka (MIS 5, Late Pleistocene). The Larache footprints are, therefore, the oldest attributed to Homo sapiens in Northern Africa and the Southern Mediterranean.
PB Springer
SN 2045-2322 (electrónico)
YR 2024
FD 2024-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23694
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23694
LA eng
NO Sedrati, M., Morales, J. A., Duveau, J., M’rini, A. E., Mayoral, E., Díaz‐Martínez, I., Anthony, E. J., Bulot, G., Sedrati, A., Le Gall, R., Santos, A., & Rivera-Silva, J. (2024). A Late Pleistocene hominin footprint site on the North African coast of Morocco. In Scientific Reports (Vol. 14, Issue 1). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-52344-5
NO The authors are grateful to Iliass Sedrati, Abdelkarim Tadibaght, Mrani-Alaoui Beni for their untiring help and support during the field surveys, and Reda Hawat for operating the drone. We also thank the Provincial Directorate in Larache of the Ministry of Equipment, Transport, Logistics, and Water, as well as the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces, for authorizations and support in the field. This work is part of the project Gof-Boulders “Geomorphological control on offshore boulders transport along a wave-dominated coast” funded by the University South Brittany and ISblue-the Interdisciplinary graduate school for the blue planet (ANR-17-EURE-0015)—and co-funded by a grant from the French government under the program “Investissements d’Avenir”. J.D. research is funded by the FYSSEN foundation. I.D.M. is supported by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2022) and by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain. This article has also received support from Project PID2019-104625RB-100, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, by the Andalusian Government to the Research Group RNM276 and by the Centro Científico-Tecnológico de Huelva (CCTH).
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026