The 85 Footprints at Larache

Around 90,000 years ago, several people crossed a beach on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Their footprints survived. Unlike a bone or a tool, each track records a moment of movement.

The surface covers about 2,800 square metres south of the Loukkos River estuary. Across it, researchers documented 85 human footprints. Some point toward the sea; others lead inland. The range of sizes suggests that more than one age group was present.

It is tempting to turn the scene into a family story. The evidence does not justify that. Different-sized feet do not tell us the exact relationships between the people who made them, and the tracks may not all have been laid down at precisely the same moment.

What they preserve is still extraordinary: direct traces of human bodies moving across a Late Pleistocene shore.

Why footprints are different

Skeletal fossils are the remains of bodies. Stone tools are objects shaped or used by people. Footprints record behaviour at the instant it happened.

Track dimensions can support cautious estimates of stature, body mass, gait and direction. A group of prints can reveal how a surface was crossed. Every estimate, however, depends on preservation, sediment, anatomy and the quality of the track.

The Larache study combined measurements with aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry rather than treating each hollow as a perfect mould of a foot. Researchers describe a semi-dissipative sandy beach foreshore. The impressions were made in sediment that later hardened and survived waves, wind, erosion and geological change.

Dating a beach surface

The team used optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL, on a sample from the track-bearing formation. The method estimates when mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight before burial.

The result placed the footprint surface at 90.3 ± 7.6 thousand years ago. That uncertainty is part of the date, not a flaw to hide. The tracks are approximately 90,000 years old; science does not claim they were made in a single known year.

Eighty-five tracks. Different sizes. Movement toward and away from the sea. The evidence is vivid enough without inventing a scene.

A North African first

Before Larache, no Pleistocene or Pliocene human footprint site had been documented in North Africa. The researchers identify these tracks as the oldest human footprints known from the region and among the oldest attributed to Homo sapiens worldwide.

The claim is geographic and chronological, not a declaration that these were the first people to walk in Morocco. Other evidence shows hominin occupation in North Africa much earlier. Jebel Irhoud preserves early Homo sapiens fossils more than 300,000 years old, while Casablanca’s archaeological sequence extends far deeper.

The footprints add a different kind of evidence. They place human movement on a Moroccan shoreline during Marine Isotope Stage 5, when Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts formed part of the landscapes used by people across the region.

What the tracks cannot tell us

The prints preserve no names, language, destination or motive. Direction alone cannot tell us whether someone was gathering food, travelling, playing or simply crossing the shore. The smallest tracks should not automatically be described as children unless measurement supports a careful age estimate.

This restraint does not make the discovery less vivid. It keeps the real evidence visible — and lets an ordinary movement across wet sand become one of Morocco’s most direct encounters with deep time.

Primary source

• Moubtahij, Z. et al. “A Late Pleistocene hominin footprint site on the North African coast of Morocco.” Scientific Reports 14, 1962 (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-52344-5.