Kutztown University professor Dr. David Webb has been analyzing ancient footprints from the Ciur-Izbuc Cave in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.
The cave’s ‘chamber of footprints’ had once contained 400 footprints, and nearly 200 of them were in good condition. But in the summer of 2012, Webb found only 51 had survived.
“Our plan was to learn as much as we could about the people who left the original footprints and expand on the findings of the original researchers,” he said. “With so few footprints left, we couldn’t do some of the things we wanted to – such as measure the length of the strides. Tourists have removed some of the identifying flags, and some footprints may have dried up. Others have modern boot prints on top of them. We might never know what happened to them.”
With Dr. Oana Moldovan, a member of the Romanian Academy’s Speleology [study of caves] Institute, Webb used a total station (3D mapping device) to map the cave and its remaining footprints. Before leaving Romania, Webb and the rest of his team learned several new things about the cave and its footprints. For example, they now know that the muddy floor of the cave was laid down during an underground flood, and they calculated that all 400 footprints could have been made by a small group of people in less than ten minutes.
Radiocarbon measurements of two cave bear bones excavated just below the footprints indicate that Homo sapiens made these tracks around 36,500 years ago, and that the footprints belonged to six or seven people, at least one of whom was a child. According to Webb, if the footprints are close to 36,000 years old, they were probably made by some of the earliest humans in Europe or by human/ Neanderthal hybrids.
Recently, several national and international news outlets have contacted Webb for further information about his research and photographs of the cave. Media outlets which have featured Webb’s work include the Royal Institution of Australia, a science website; Ciencia Hoje (Science Today), a Brazilian science magazine from the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science; Science News; and Bihoreanul, a newspaper in Bihor county, Romania.
In addition, Webb has written a short article for Aktuel Arkeoloji (Actual Archeology), a Turkish archeology magazine for laymen. The English version of Actual Archeology, which is forthcoming, will also publish Webb’s article. The original, technical article appeared this summer in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the main journal in Webb’s field.