The study of fossil footprints may not sound as exciting as finding fossil bones but as R S Lull, a dinosaur hunter at the turn of the last century, pointed out, footprints are fossils of living beings while petrified bones are of the dead. A humanoid footprint appearing at a time when there were no humans is bound to make you think. Yet reports of fossil human footprints are far from uncommon.
According to the American Encyclopedia, some rocks in Tennessee bear impressions of tracks of various animals and tracks of human beings “as visible and perfect as if they were made in snow or sand”. The American Journal of Science of 1833 noted that a Mr Schoolcraft and a Mr Benton had observed prints of “human” feet in Mississippi limestone. An eminent geologist of the time stated they were “certain evidence that man existed at the epoch of the deposition of that limestone”.
Man? Whatever the views of some fundamentalist bible thumpers, man has unquestionably evolved from a common ancestor with the apes over about the last five million years. Human tracks could not appear in limestone—it is much older. But what if some species of dinosaur had evolved by convergent evolution into a man-like form? Isn’t it possible that the footprints of such a creature, fossilized in the limestone but eroded over the intervening tens of millions of years could be mistaken for the prints of a human being? The eminent geologist goes on to say that the discoverer of the megatherium, Sir Woodbine Parish, had seen similar footprints in the rocks of South America. A man of his reputation seems unlikely to get the age of his rock strata wrong. The impressions seen, although unquestionably human-like, must have been actually of some anthropic reptilian type.
The American Anthropologist reported in 1896 that the Ohio State Academy of Science had exhibited a large stone containing the print of a human foot 14 inches long. In 1975, Dr Stanley Rhine of the University of New Mexico announced the discovery of footprints human in appearance in strata estimated to be 40 million years old. Similar discoveries were made in Kenton, Oklahoma and in Wisconsin.
Steiger relates yet another instance, an engineer called Johnson found footprints in an ancient sandstone near Tulsa. Johnson had had to remove earth and roots to uncover the fossils which evidently were human-like, and which were impressed in a block of sandstone weighing about 15 tons.
In the 1930s, Mr Roland T Bird, who collected dinosaurs for the American Museum, introduced the world to a Lower Cretaceous site at Glen Rose, 80 miles from Fort Worth in Texas. The locals had discovered fossil footprints long before and Bird was startled to see the 20 inch tracks of a carnivorous dinosaur in the foundation stone of the county court house. Subsequently Bird uncovered a remarkable and now famous Cretaceous drama—the tracks of an apatosaurus being harassed by a large flesh eater. More interestingly still, a 16 inch footprint, described as man-like, and dinosaur tracks were found in strata of the same period.
In 1938, a Mr Berry and his companions found tracks of what appeared to be sabre tooth tigers, dinosaurs and three tracks of humans in the limestone bed of the Palaxy River. Since then many others have been found and an unknown number manufactured as the enterprising locals realized that fortune had provided them with the basis for a cottage industry supplying tourists with mementos. Fortunately the experts reassure us that they can comfortably distinguish the forgeries from the real thing. The “human” tracks seemed to show all the distinguishing features one would expect of a human foot bearing in mind that, coming from Lower Cretaceous deposits, they presumably were a hundred million years old, but they were 16 inches long. Humans could not have made prints of that antiquity, but we must respect the possibility of them being evidence of a dinosaur with a human-like foot.
Dr C Burdick has publicized similar “human” tracks. Dr Burdick, it must be admitted, has his own axe to grind, being a creationist. He believes in the strict truth of the Biblical description of the creation and rejects the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution, modified or otherwise. Naturally, creationists like Dr Burdick would be delighted if the discovery proved to be of human tracks because the conventional evolutionary scheme does not allow for advanced mammals let alone human beings to be alive at the same time as the dinosaurs. Having said that, I presume that Dr Burdick, as a god fearing man, would not deliberately be dishonest and fabricate relics to make his point.
He describes “15 to 20 giant barefoot human tracks, each about 16 inches in length and eight inches in width”. Sceptics maintain that the prints were those of giant sloths. But the spacing of the prints, initially six feet, widened to nine feet as the being apparently broke into a run, only the toes and the ball of the foot then being evident as would be expected of a running biped. Sloths were not noted for bursts of speed.
Human or Human Like
The largest and clearest tracks yet discovered were found in 1973. The footprints were described as 21 inches long, eight inches wide and five inches across the instep. The creature’s stride was seven feet. The impressions are in the same layer of rock as tracks of the anatosaur, a duck billed dinosaur. Steiger comments:
If the tracks are accepted as human, then scientists will be forced either to place man back in time to the Cretaceous period or to bring the dinosaurs forward to the Pleistocene period.
But this worst of all worlds stems only from the acceptance of the tracks as human. A more credible assumption altogether is that the prints are not human but are the fossils of tracks made by dinosaurs that had evolved by convergent evolution into a human like form—an intelligent being, or its precursor, that evolved from the bipedal dinosaurs!
In October 1983, Steven Schafersman of the Texas Council for Science Education in a letter to Geotimes questioned the identification of the man tracks found alongside dinosaur tracks in places like Glen Rose. The genuinely fossil footprints he considered to be poor quality dinosaur prints in which mud had flowed back into the depressions altering their shapes or where the dinosaur had slipped making a track of odd shape. Others were not prints at all but random indentations containing several fossil worm casts wrongly interpreted as the ridges between toe prints. Finally, there were fakes, footprint impressions deliberately carved in the soft limestone.
It is a pity that creationism is still an issue. Some creationists or their less scrupulous supporters are indeed willing to resort to fakery to disprove evolution by proving that men and dinosaurs lived on the earth together. What sort of a God do they have that requires his mortal devotees to fake fossils to defend him? Does he really advocate dishonesty? To the being that created the world in seven days surely a plethora of genuine fossil man tracks should be no trouble if he felt they were necessary!
Schafersman, as a science teacher facing up to the creationists’ fakery, is perhaps justified in attempting to write off the curious “man like” prints. What of the contention, though, that he prints are indeed dinosaur prints but ones which have become “man like” through structural convergence? Is this not a reasonable possibility—at any rate just as reasonable as the mixed bag of explanations thought up by Schafersman? Perhaps, he is substituting bogusly creative answers for bogus creationist answers.
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