On the upright hominids, it is known that they are from Africa. The hominids are the most highly organized family of anthropoid apes. According to most scientists, it includes Australopithecus; and, according to the prevailing notion of the origin of hominids, they are a branch of higher primates, which has led to the emergence of Homo sapiens.

There are some bones in Africa and some tracks, found in Laetoli. Laetoli is a site in Tanzania, where footprints of upright hominids, who had lived about 3.6 Ma ago, have been found in 1978. It is unique in comparison with other sites of paleontological excavations in Africa because its climate, landscape and ecosystem remain unchanged for several million years.

It would seem – what else do scientists want, but unwanted finds have been made at an unnecessary place, breaking a well-established concept and encouraging the rewriting of textbooks.

It was in 2000 when a Polish geologist G.Gierliński visited Crete. He swam in azure waves and looked at stones with his old geological habit. Suddenly he has found strange tracks. Gierliński thought about it very long time then until 2010, when he returned to the wonderful place with another Polish geologist – Niedźwiedzki. They convinced each other of the significance of the discovery and decided to tell it the world. 7 years have not passed since the article with the sensation was released and we could read it.

29 footprints stretched in several chains along the petrified beach in Trachilos in the west of Crete. Obviously, the birthplace of the Minotaur has long attracted visitors with its natural beauty. But how long has it been? The discovery has been made by geologists, and no wonder that gazing through their microscopes at foraminifers in the ancient sand they determined that the last time waves had crossed it 3.5-8.5 Ma ago, at the time of Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea turned into a couple of salted lakesides. Just then an unknown “beach man” walked along the shore wetted with water for the last time. This lakeside was vaporized, and the sand turned to crust.

According to the discoverers, the footprints are quite like those of a man: the toes are folded, the big toe is bigger than the rest, the foot is long, although shorter than the one from Laetoli. And so, we are seeing prints of a bipedal upright hominids. Moreover, the prints are much more hominin-like than the alleged footprints of an Ardipithecus, at whose foot the big toe is sticking almost at a right angle to the other toes.

How can we not recall the recent sensation – the “discovery” of a Graecopithecus when «his jaw» from Greece with a tooth from Bulgaria were dated 7,175 and 7,24 Ma old; and the habitat of such species has been determined as savannah.

Scientists assure: by all signs, the footprints belong to a humanoid being. You can distinguish five toes, a heel and other characteristic features, so it was traces of people on the island of Crete what could not be, according to accepted now theories: the chain of tracks is 5,7 Ma old, as it was possible to establish, and all who could take a walk along the Cretan coast, even theoretically, were at that time in Africa. They got out of it and settled in Europe only after 3 Ma.

Maybe it’s time to rewrite the textbooks: the upright primates appeared a couple of million years earlier than was thought, and not at all in Africa, but in Europe.

Let us all consider. If we are talking about the Messinian Salinity Crisis, there was no difference between Africa and Europe: the present bottom of the Mediterranean Sea was a huge hilly savannah, along which the animals could walk as much as they wanted there and back. The question remains open – to what extent that area was generally suitable for life. Perhaps, there were there gigantic barren solonchaks, such as at the present coast of the Aral Sea, where primates have no place to live at all.

Whose are these really traces? Do they really belong to a hominid? Most of the prints are unclear and cannot be disassembled. Only a couple of it is clear. The proportions of several prints are very different. Why on one of the best footprint are only four toes? Clearly, one should not expect too much from the traces on the sand of such an antiquity, but this is all suspicious.

Their sizes are strange. Judging by the photographs and the scale, the length of some feet was eight centimeters, others – ten, the third – thirteen, others – fifteen. In any case, it is not enough for a person. The smallest Australopithecus of Laetoli had the length of the foot 15.5-22.5 cm, a large Australopithecus had one of 18-23 cm, that is, 1.5-3 times more. All they were very low creatures: the growth of Lucy was 1 meter 7 cm.

How tall were the Cretan little men supposed to be – half a meter?

Of course, everything can be attributed to the fact that he was Graekopithecus, whose foot no one has ever seen. But why not assume that he was Oreopithecus (Oreopithecus bambolii), who came here from his Gargano (national park and historical area of ​​Italy, one of the northernmost points of the region of Apulia) over the drying bottom? This possibility is rejected by the authors, remembering the protruding big toe of the Oreopithecus, but there was a million years between the Italian Oreopithecus and the Cretan tracks – the big toe could stick to the others. Given the geography, could it be the Minotaur?

There are also doubts about time. There is no absolute dating. Foraminifers and stratigraphy are, of course, wonderful, but the possible time span is very large one: ranges of 3.5-8.5 and 5.6-8.5 Ma are suggested, and in general the beaches are washed in and washed away, so how long ago those unknown animals have passed there…

What outweighs – the facts or the desire for a sensation? Apparently, it’s worth following the traces and finding at the end of the path the skeleton, which would reveal all the secrets.

January 2018

Source:

Gierliński G.D., Niedźwiedzki G., Lockley M.G., Athanassiou A., Fassoulas Ch., Dubicka Z., Boczarowski A., Bennett M.R. et Ahlberg P.E. Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete? // Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006