Never had so many Neanderthal footprints been discovered all at once. A few dozen meters from the Normandy shore, in Rozel, in the English Channel, under dunes nestled in cliffs, archaeologists have discovered 257 footprints, miraculously preserved for 80,000 years.
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The footprints offer only a "snapshot" of the life of the small group of Neanderthals who occupied the site, then a kilometer or two away from the water. They suggest that this group numbered between 10 and 13 people. The vast majority of the footprints belonged to children and teenagers, but there were also a few adults, one of which was very tall and measured 1.90 meters, a height estimated from the length of the feet.
These Neanderthals were probably present on the site from autumn to spring, explains Jérémy Duveau, doctoral student at the National Museum of Natural History and one of the co-authors of the study describing the discovery, published in the Accounts of the American Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious scientific journal.
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The site had been discovered by an amateur in the 1960s, Yves Roupin, but it was not until 2012, faced with the danger of erosion by wind and tide, that rescue excavations were organized , three months a year, led by Dominique Cliquet, from the regional directorate of cultural affairs for Normandy and the CNRS.
Dozens of meters of sand were removed by mechanical shovels to reach the interesting layers. Then, with a brush, the researchers discovered the footprints, left at the time in grassy and muddy ground. How did they survive? Thanks to the sand which, by covering them immediately, preserved them.
To the 257 traces described in the article for the period 2012-2017 are added hundreds of other discoveries since last year. "The footprints have an interest, which is also their defect: they represent a kind of snapshot of the life of individuals over very brief periods. This allows us to have an idea of the composition of the group, but it is possible that they represent the group when certain individuals were outside", says Jérémy Duveau.
The question then becomes: are there few adult footprints because Neanderthals died young? Or were the adults somewhere else?
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Each has, moreover, been photographed and modeled in three dimensions. Some were molded with elastomer, a material more flexible than plaster. And since 2017, thanks to a new technique of soil solidification by a chemical solution, hundreds of traces have been extracted to be preserved. Those that were not removed were "totally destroyed" by the wind, says Jérémy Duveau. "The preservation of fingerprints requires a kind of miracle. We have to be very lucky," he concludes.
Prior to Rozel, only nine confirmed Neanderthal footprints had been discovered in Greece, Romania, Gibraltar and France.
A few casts of Rozel have already been exhibited, including at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, and the researchers say they want to exhibit more to the general public in the future. In the meantime, all the extracted fingerprints are stored in the repositories of the regional directorate for cultural affairs in Normandy.
