Laetoli Footprints

The most important thing here cannot be seen

Laetoli is one of the most significant palaeontological sites in Africa and it is not a visitor attraction. The trackway that makes it famous was reburied for its own protection, and what a traveller can actually look at is a set of replicas in the Olduvai museum, some thirty kilometres away. That is worth knowing before anyone builds a detour around the name.

The site lies on the southern edge of the Serengeti plains inside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, well north of Lake Eyasi. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority describes it as open to researchers working on human origins and cultural development, with teams from Tanzanian and foreign universities visiting each year to work on geological bed exposures across more than fifty separate sites.

What was found

About 3.6 million years ago two early hominins walked across wet volcanic ash near Laetoli. A further eruption laid down ash on top, and the prints set. The NCAA describes the result as the oldest known footprints of early human ancestors in the world, showing three distinct tracks of an upright-walking hominin identified as Australopithecus afarensis. The authority gives the whole trail as almost 27 metres long, with approximately 70 print impressions.

The history of the work is longer than the famous discovery. The NCAA records that Kohl-Larsen, a German researcher, first studied the area in the 1920s and recovered a few fossils; that the wider area’s significance has been recognised since the mid-1930s; that Laetoli became widely known in the 1970s through discoveries including the holotype; and that the hominid footprints themselves were found in 1974 by a team led by Mary Leakey, with excavations in 1978 and 1979.

The geology is the reason so much survived. The NCAA describes a long series of Plio-Pleistocene, predominantly volcano-sedimentary deposits rich in archaeological and palaeontological material, overlying Precambrian metamorphic rock.

Why it is buried

Exposed footprints in volcanic tuff do not survive weather, roots or feet. Reburial is the standard conservation answer, and it is the one applied here. The consequence for visitors is absolute: there is nothing at Laetoli to look at, and a site that is closed for conservation reasons is not a site that opens for a good enough reason.

What is genuinely available is the replica trackway at Olduvai, a curator who can explain what the prints show about how these individuals walked, and the context of the gorge itself. See archaeological tours and museum tours.

Laetoli and Engare Sero are not the same site

Tanzania has two celebrated sets of ancient human footprints and travel copy mixes them constantly. Laetoli is 3.6 million years old and made by Australopithecus afarensis. The Engare Sero footprints beside Lake Natron are the work of anatomically modern humans between roughly 6,000 and 19,000 years ago, and they are a different kind of site in every respect.

Common questions