Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be

I hate the clickbaity title and will not click it. So I’m just gonna assume they’re talking about the moon

given the fossil and archeological evidence for the spread of H. sapiens into the Levant and Arabia during [the era 130,000 to 80,000 years ago] and absence of Homo neanderthalensis from the Levant at that time, we argue that H. sapiens was responsible for the tracks at Alathar.

Scientists: Since we already know H. Sapiens was here then, we think they did it.

Headline: Human footprints shouldn’t be here then!

The linked Popular Mechanics article cites this Smithsonian article.

The Smithsonian article cites this National Geographic article and this Science Advances article (among others).

The National Geographic article is paywalled.

The Science Advances research article seems to be the original source—here’s the abstract:

The nature of human dispersals out of Africa has remained elusive because of the poor resolution of paleoecological data in direct association with remains of the earliest non-African people. Here, we report hominin and non-hominin mammalian tracks from an ancient lake deposit in the Arabian Peninsula, dated within the last interglacial. The findings, it is argued, likely represent the oldest securely dated evidence for Homo sapiens in Arabia. The paleoecological evidence indicates a well-watered semi-arid grassland setting during human movements into the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. We conclude that visitation to the lake was transient, likely serving as a place to drink and to forage, and that late Pleistocene human and mammalian migrations and landscape use patterns in Arabia were inexorably linked.

Ceiling?

Yepp, sounds like humans all right.

Right outside your bedroom window.

Ugh, probably tracking sand across my freshly washed floors!

On my lawn‽

Turns out it should be.