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Footprints on the Ciampate del Diavolo. (edmondo gnerre/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0) ============================================================================================= According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock. The tracks are known as the "Ciampate del Diavolo"' or "Devil's Trail" – but details published in 2020 reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to be. The mysterious footprints are well known to those living near Roccamonfina, an extinct volcano in southern Italy that hasn't erupted in tens of thousands of years. Since 2001, researchers have...

    Oldest human footprints found on volcano   19:00 12 March 03   NewScientist.com news service   The trails of footprints (A and B) have as many as 27 steps (Image: Paolo Mietto and Marco Avanzini)   Three primitive humans who scrambled down a volcano's slopes more than 325,000 years ago left their footprints fossilised in volcanic ash. If the ages of the trails are confirmed, they could be the earliest known footprints of our Homo ancestors. Paolo Mietto of Padua University and his colleagues examined three tracks of footprints on the Roccamonfina volcano in southern Italy, known to locals as...

The newly-discovered footprints descending an inclined slope of an extinct volcano (Pic: University of Padua)  Markings in hardened volcanic ash, dubbed "devils' trails" by local Italian villagers, have been confirmed as the oldest-known footprints ever made by humans. The fossilised hand and footprints belong to three early humans who were probably climbing down the side of the Roccamonfina volcano in southern Italy about 385,000 to 325,000 years ago, report a team of Italian palaeontologists in today's issue of the journal, Nature. "We believe that these tracks are the oldest human footprints found so far," said Professor Paolo Mietto of...

It's official: the oldest human footprints ever found are 345,000 years old, give or take 6000. Known as the "devils' trails", they have been preserved in volcanic ash atop the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy. The prints were first described to the world by Paolo Mietto and colleagues of the University of Padova in Italy in 2003 after amateur archaeologists pointed them out. At the time, the team estimated that the prints were anywhere between 385,000 and 325,000 years old, based on when the volcano was thought to have last erupted. Now, Stéphane Scaillet and colleagues at the Laboratory of Climatic...