6/5/2019 Rock Art and Footprints Reveal How Ancient Humans Responded to Volcanic Eruption | Smart News | Smithsonian

JUNE 4, 2019 Follow @meilansolly

Rock Art and Footprints Reveal How

Ancient Humans Responded to Volcanic
Eruption
|
Smart News
Thousands of years ago, hominins living in what is now western Turkey
witnessed the eruption of the Çakallar volcano. Intrigued by the
spectacular sight, walking stick-wielding locals and their canine
companions ventured closer, leaving a trail of footprints in the wet ash
blanketing the ground. Eventually, built-up volcanic rock buried the
tracks, shielding them until 1968, when the rediscovery of the “Kula
footprints” led a Turkish paleontologist to initially conclude that
they’d been left by Neanderthals some 250,000 years ago.

Now, a new study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews

updates the evolving consensus on the footprints’ origins, suggesting
that humans left the tracks 4,700 years ago and may have even created
a cave painting inspired by the volcanic activity they’d witnessed.
Researchers led by İnan Ulusoy, a geological engineer at Turkey’s
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Hacettepe University, used two independent rock dating methods to

better pinpoint the preserved tracks’ age. Their ndings stand in
contrast to the initial 1968 understanding of the Kula footprints’ age
and timestamp the tracks 5,000 years later than the most recent
estimate in 2016.

As Laura Geggel reports for Live Science, the rst of the dating
techniques the researchers used measured uranium and thorium’s
decay into helium to calculate the age of small zircon crystals retrieved
from the site. The second method, meanwhile, tracked radioactive
chlorine levels that indicated how long the volcanic rocks had been
situated near Earth’s surface. Together, this analysis places the
Çakallar eruption around 4,700 years ago.

Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, so like other

scholarship over the past three decades, the study posits that Bronze
Age Homo sapiens were responsible for leaving the marks. Ulusoy and
his colleagues also outline evidence connecting the footprints with a
nearby prehistoric rock painting that was familiar to locals but has only
been under scienti c scrutiny since 2008.

According to both the study and Turkish archaeology news site

Arkeolojik Haber, the artwork in question is known as the Kanlitaş rock
painting. Found just 1.24 miles away from the footprints, the ocher
drawing depicts a cone-shaped structure topped by a crater-like
ellipsis. A thick line below the cone could show lava ow and falling
rocks, while scattered lines surrounding the painting’s focal point
could represent volcanic vents.

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“Weighing evidence from the volcanologically consistent details in the

painting, we hypothesize that Bronze-age eye-witnesses of the
eruption also generated the rock art,” the researchers write in the
study. “This link between the Kanlitaş painting and the eruption
remains, however, tentative until rm temporal constraints for the
painting can be established.”

Live Science’s Geggel notes that the latest research joins previous
studies in debunking a theory that suggests the footprints were left by
people eeing the site of the eruption. Based on the distance between
the steps, the team argues that the observers were walking at normal
speeds toward the volcano, not away from it. This relaxed pace
indicates that the footprint-leavers embarked on their journey after the
initial blast. In a statement, study co-author Martin Danišík of
Australia’s Curtin University adds that the group likely arrived in time
to watch the nal spurts of lava from a safe distance. Inspired by the
unusual occurrence, these same humans may have gone on to create an
artistic record of the event.

“I think that people excited by the noise of the rst hydrovolcanic

eruption then started to approach the eruption site,” Ulusoy tells Live
Science. “Anyone can imagine that this is an event that one may face
rarely in a lifetime. This may have given the inspiration to the Bronze
Age people to leave the note behind.”

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