San trio to follow trail of early man

THE TRACKS TSAMKXAO CIQAE WILL follow are so old that they were left when Europe was covered by glaciers and inhabited by woolly mammoths.

Ciqae’s day job usually involves tracking spoor for trophy hunters and tourists near his home in Namibia, but next month he and two colleagues, C/wi/kunta and C/wig/aqo de!u will, be going to France.

There they will be tracking for science. The plan is that the three San trackers will head into two caves in France and study the footprints left by Europe’s earliest inhabitants. Their insight could add to science’s understanding of how these people lived.

This is start of a threeyear study, which will see the trackers visit several caves in France.

It is a continuation of an exploratory visit the three made in 2013, when they were invited to France by Tilman Lenssen-erz of the University of Cologne, Germany.

Lenssen-erz wanted to see if they could throw light on what these hunter gatherers were doing inside these caves.

What the three San trackers found astonished the academics. Not only could they identify the sex of the person who left the print, they could also give their ages too.

They identified 28 individual tracks, the eldest was a 60-yearold man, the youngest just 3.

“For the trackers a footprint provides as much information about someone as a face does for us, said Lenssen-erz, “They can even tell the mood of a person.”

The trackers helped solve a mystery. For a long time, archaeologists had thought that a jumble of footprints in the cave of Niaux had been left by dancers, taking part in a ritualistic dance.

The San were quick to realise that the prints were made by a single person, a 14-year-old girl, who was pressing her feet deep into the clay probably as part of a game.

Archaeologists had also believed that they had found a print that showed someone wearing a shoe. It wasn’t the case – the San noticed the faint impressions of the person’s toes in the soil.

“What the three trackers have shown us is that the people were coming into the caves simply to have a look. So, typical of human beings, they were simply exploring,” said Lenssen-erz.

Next month the team will visit two caves, Tuc d Audoubert and Pech-merle. Each foray into the cave takes a half day, as the work is hard going.

“At Tuc d Audoubert, there are a lot more tracks to look at. There is an exciting place at the back of the cave,” Lenssen-erz said.

“It would be interesting if one person’s tracks can be found in different places.”