The Devil's footprints are a trail of footprint tracks made in the volcanic ash of the Quaternary volcano Roccamonfina in the Campanian plain of southern Italy, about 345,000 years ago, by one of our hominid ancestors. The Campanian plain is where, some 343,000 years later, Vesuvius erupted.
The Devil's Footprints are arranged in three distinct trackways with 56 footprints. The tracks have an average pace of 60 centimeters and a stride of about 120 centimeters. The average footprint length is 20 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide, and researchers surmise that this individual stood about 1.35 meters tall.
Whoever the walker was, he was someone who was fully bipedal, with a free-standing gait. The footprints were pressed into a freshly deposited volcanic ash, and based on estimated height, weight and date of the deposit, were probably made by our hominid ancestor Homo heidelbergensis.
Sources
Mietto, Paolo, Marco Avanzini, and Giuseppe Rolandi. 2003. Palaeontology: Human footprints in Pleistocene volcanic ash. Nature 422:133
Scaillet, Stéphane, Grazia Vita-Scailleta, and Hervé Guillou 2008 Oldest human footprints dated by Ar/Ar. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 275(3-4):320-325.
