The oldest known footprints of an anatomically modern human are embedded in rock north of Cape Town, South Africa. Geologist David Roberts and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger announced the discovery of the footprints in August 1997. A human being made the footprints about 117,000 years ago by walking through wet sand, which eventually hardened into rock.

Markings in hardened volcanic ash, dubbed "devils' trails" by local Italian villagers, have been confirmed as the oldest-known footprints ever made by humans.

The fossilised hand and footprints belong to three early humans who were probably climbing down the side of the Roccamonfina volcano in southern Italy about 385,000 to 325,000 years ago, report a team of Italian palaeontologists in today's issue of the journal, Nature.

"We believe that these tracks are the oldest human footprints found so far," said Professor Paolo Mietto of the University of Padua in Italy, who lead the research. "They are made by hominids who had a fully bipedal, free-standing gait, using their hands only to steady themselves on the difficult descent."

"In some of the prints, the impressions made by the heel and ball of the foot are clear, and there are even small depressions that can be interpreted as toe impression," he said.

They were made by primitive humans that walked upright with a free-standing gait and used their hands to steady themselves. Three tracks with prints show curve or zizgzag patterns. The prints, embedded in fossilised volcanic ash, are about 20 cm (eight inches) long and 10 cm wide and belonged to primitive humans who were about 1.5 metres tall.

He added that older footprints of hominids, or human-like ancestors, that were made by more distant ancestors, date back 3.5 million years and were found in petrified volcanic ash at Laetoli in northern Tanzania.

Reuters, Agençe France-Presse

Giant Footprint Found in Solid Granite in 2002

A Ramona man has found what looks to be a footprint from Bigfoot. The giant fossilized footprint suggests the yeti could have once lived in the nearby mountains.

A gránit kb. egymilliárd éves

It's one heck of a climb to see the footprint; more than a thousand feet up a rugged mountain in the Cleveland National Forest. And James Snyder's house sits right at the bottom."I go out of my way to make a slip trail where nobody else has been and I was actually looking for gold," said Snyder. That was back in February. But instead of finding gold on Gowers Mountain, Snyder found a giant fossilized footprint, at least it looks like one, embedded in solid granite. The footprint was found in what becomes a creek bed during the rainy season. It looks as though something big crossed the creek a long time ago leaving its footprint behind. What made it and when? Who knows. But Snyder is convinced it was a Yeti or sasquatch or Bigfoot. "When I saw it I told my buddy, I said I found Bigfoot up there," said Snyder. He hopes someone who knows about this sort of thing will contact him. "But the neat thing about it to me, is most of your Bigfoots, or their casts or whatnot, come out of snow that you can't go back and check, or muddy soil, where as soon as you get a hard rain, well that's gone too.

This is, well we can look at it. We can study it. We can bring scientists here," said Snyder. But it won't be easy. The terrain at the top of Mt. Gowers looks like Mars, and it's about as hard to get to. You can actually go see the footprint if you're prepared to walk an hour and a half, and that's only if you know where you're going. But it's certainly worth the trip. That is, if you're interested in seeing one really BIG foot.

http://www.s8int.com/page5.html:

Large Shoe Print in Rock

A lenyomat 10-20 millió évvel ezelőtti

This photo was taken in northern Washington state and was reportedly found with another partial imprint. It appears to be the shoeprint of a large individual (see man's shoe in lower left of photo for comparison)approximately 16 inches long from heel to toe.

The rock itself is judged by geologists in "evolutionary time" (as opposed to actual time) to be between 10 and 20 million years old. The point is, according to evolutionary theory, no one should have been around early enough to leave a shoe imprint in what is now solid rock. No one should have been around to draw one either.

There remains the possibilty of course that someone painstakingly chiseled out two convincing shoeprints in recent times and left them on a mountain.