The Nahoon Footprints: When a Child Walked on the Shore

Footprints Through Time

At Nahoon Point in East London, a child once walked across damp beach sand and left footprints that would last more than 120,000 years. These fossilized tracks, now preserved at the East London Museum, are among the oldest known footprints made by Homo sapiens anywhere in the world.

The site, part of the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve, also holds impressions of small antelope and a large bird, frozen in the same ancient surface. Together, they tell a story of life along the Eastern Cape coast during the Late Pleistocene, when early humans lived and played by the sea.

Discovery in Bat’s Cave (1964)

In 1964, two municipal workers, Bill Hartley and Rhett Kaiser, took shelter in a seaside cavern called Bat’s Cave. Looking up, they noticed what appeared to be footprints on the ceiling. The strange shapes turned out to be fossilized tracks, since the ceiling was once the ancient sandy floor that later hardened into rock.

After the find was reported, the East London Museum confirmed the prints were genuine trace fossils. Shortly after, the cave roof collapsed and the slab fell to the ground. Museum staff quickly recovered and preserved it, saving one of the clearest and most significant prehistoric discoveries in South Africa.

What the Prints Reveal

The slab preserves three kinds of footprints:

• A child’s bare human foot, showing clear toe and heel impressions

• Two small antelope tracks

• A large bird print, possibly from an ostrich-like species

The human footprints likely belonged to a child aged around 9 to 12 years old, walking upright on soft coastal sand. Nearby animals had passed not long before, perhaps startled or simply crossing the same beach. Over time, sand and minerals sealed these impressions, turning them into stone.

From the Coast to the Museum

Today, the original slab rests safely inside the East London Museum, protected behind glass. Visitors can view the exact footprints made by that ancient child, displayed alongside other iconic specimens such as the coelacanth and the museum’s dodo egg.

At Nahoon Point, a replica cast and interpretive displays inside the Coastal Education Centre (shaped like a giant footprint) mark the spot where the discovery was made, bringing visitors close to where history began.

Why It Matters

Geological tests date the prints to around 124,000 years ago, a time when modern humans already thrived along Southern Africa’s coasts. The Nahoon footprints were the first ancient human tracks found in Africa, and for decades they were the oldest known in the world.

They are more than fossils. They are a moment of life preserved. They remind us that children once ran along the same shores we walk today, long before written history.

Ongoing work by researchers like Kevin Cole (East London Museum) and Dr. Dave Roberts (Council for Geoscience) continues to uncover more traces at Nahoon Point, adding pieces to this ancient puzzle.

A Heritage Worth Protecting

The Nahoon Point Nature Reserve was created in 2004 to protect this coastline and its story. There are calls to recognise the site as a national or even World Heritage Site, highlighting its global importance as a link to early modern humans.

Standing before the footprint display, visitors can quite literally follow in the steps of a child who lived more than a hundred millennia ago, a timeless connection between past and present.