Earliest parietal art: hominin hand and foot traces from the middle Pleistocene of Tibet

Fossil footprints and what they mean for hominin paleobiology

“…Zhang and colleagues recently published an even more contentious hypothesis that traces preserved near ancient hot springs at Quesang in Tibet represent the world's oldest known evidence of parietal art. 49 The interpretation of artistic behavior is based on an arrangement of hand impressions in travertine mud, which clearly represent nonlocomotor behavior. At present, it is difficult to confidently distinguish artistic expression from other circumstances in which one might place their hand on the ground surface (e.g., lowering or raising oneself to or from the ground, or placing a hand down while entering or exiting a hot spring).…”

“…Multiple hominin track surfaces that date to between 1.2 and 0.7 Ma were discovered at Melka Kunture, Ethiopia 36,37 . Hominin tracks have been announced from unexpected times and places, such as an assemblage of hand and foot traces dating to 226–129 ka near Quesang, Tibet 49 and 120–110 ka human tracks from the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia 50 Neanderthal tracks are described from France, 41 Spain, 51 and Gibraltar 52 . Large assemblages of human tracks were discovered along the Cape south coast of South Africa, 53,54 at Engare Sero, Tanzania, 43 and at White Sands, New Mexico, USA 42,55,56 .…”

“…Zhang and colleagues recently published an even more contentious hypothesis that traces preserved near ancient hot springs at Quesang in Tibet represent the world's oldest known evidence of parietal art 49 . The interpretation of artistic behavior is based on an arrangement of hand impressions in travertine mud, which clearly represent nonlocomotor behavior.…”

From footprint morphometrics to the stature of fossil hominins: A common but uncertain estimate

“…Hominin footprints represent a particular remain in paleoanthropology. While they were scarce in the fossil record until the 2010s (Leakey and Hay, 1979, Bennett et al, 2009, Lockley et al, 2009, they have become in the last ten years a more and more common material thanks to discoveries in all regions and for periods ranging from the Upper Miocene to the Holocene (Ashton et al, 2014, Masao et al, 2016, Gierliński et al, 2017, Ledoux et al, 2017, Altamura et al, 2018, Bustos et al, 2018, Helm et al, 2018, Duveau et al, 2019, Stewart et al, 2020, Mayoral et al, 2021, McNutt et al, 2021, Zhang et al, 2021.…”

“…The famous Laetoli trackways are the most telling example since they represent the first direct evidence of human bipedalism used by fossil hominins (Leakey and Hay, 1979, Masao et al, 2016, McNutt et al, 2021. However, the most common information estimated from the footprints are body characteristics such as body mass (Robbins, 1986, Dingwall et al, 2013, Bennett and Morse, 2014, Domjanic et al, 2015, Ruff et al, 2021 and especially and more commonly the stature of individuals (Ashton et al, 2014, Masao et al, 2016, Altamura et al, 2018, Bustos et al, 2018, Helm et al, 2018, Duveau et al, 2019, Mayoral et al, 2021, Zhang et al, 2021. Such information gives access to the composition and the behaviours of the track-maker groups (Hatala et al, 2016c, Roach et al, 2016, Bustos et al, 2018, Duveau et al, 2019, Mayoral et al, 2021.…”