Portable tech devices record our steps as long as we wear smart watches or carry smart phones. The number of steps and the accumulated mileage always surprises me on days when I skip purposeful exercise. “Thousands of steps?” I think, as I check the number at the end of the day. “Miles of walking! Not bad for a lazy day. How did I walk so many steps? I really didn’t go anywhere.”
Going nowhere and accumulating steps is part of modern life. But, then, maybe it was always a part of hominin and hominid life, even though I imagine very long ago, long before agriculture and the rise of cities, that most walking was governed by needs for food, safety, and maybe privacy (“I’ve just gotta get out of this cave”). In these days, those smart devices we carry keep track of our steps for us because, for the most part, in all that walking over concrete, asphalt, and other hard artificial surfaces, we leave no footprints. If I extrapolate my daily step count to elsewhere and others, then millions of people daily walk billions of steps just in New York City without leaving a single track, unless they trek through Central Park or check their digital path.
For future archaeologists, the remnant roads and sidewalks will indicate both the human presence in our time and the direction of our ambulating lives: “Look they laid out the concrete paths in perpendicular patterns. Obviously, these people had assigned some ritualistic meaning to walking north and south versus east and west.” And even though there are more people alive than at any one time in the past, there might in our artificial world be just as small a chance at footprint preservation as there was when bipedalism arose in hominins whose fossilized tracks are gems in the archaeological record.
For our very ancient ancestors’ ambulating, archaeologists can’t use sidewalk and road patterns to determine the direction of daily life. Rather, they rely on chance fossilizations of footprints, the most ancient of which were uncovered at Laetoli by Mary Leakey. In a new discovery of more recent, but still ancient, footprints made by Kevin Hatala and others in Engara Sero, Tanzania, over four hundred impressions in hardened volcanic ash has led the archaeologists to draw inferences about the footprint-makers, including their size, walking or running direction, and their gender.* The footprints run largely in a northeast-southwest pattern that suggests to me a purposeful movement across a “muddy” plain, possibly a temporary migration for water not unlike the movement of wildebeest on the Serengeti today or a more "permanent" movement to a new nomadic settlement.
But think about what I just wrote. I assumed the chance preservation of a set of footprints allows me and those archaeologists to hypothesize with some surety. Yet, with regard to my own invisible steps recorded on my smart watch or phone, I look back, not to thousands to millions of years ago, but to a single day’s daylight activity and do so without remembering or even surmising where I was going in all that walking. Was there a purpose in all my movement through the house, around the property, or in the neighborhood? Was I merely “stretching my legs”? Now I have to search my memory…Naw. Not worth the effort. It really doesn’t matter where I went to reach the number of steps my watch recorded. I really didn't go anywhere significant. That I walked around provides its own reward: Without having to grow my own food or search for water, I got off my rear and moved anyway. Gives me a sense of accomplishment, even pride. “Look at how many steps I took today. Descartes would be elated: 'I move; therefore, I exist.'”
Oh! What’s this affluent bipedal life come to? Counting steps just for the sake of counting steps? Believing that what hominins did for three million or more years just to survive is the same as ambling around a house and neighborhood or as walking through the aisles of a store or the hallways of a mall in search of “more”? Thinking that my electronic record of steps will elate future archaeologists upon their discovery of an extant and working smart device? How will they infer my lifestyle and motivations; how will they understand “my times”? “Hey, Charlie and Charlene, come over here and look at this gizmo. Says here that he walked 7,856 steps on Friday.”
Both and simultaneously, “But where was he going?”
In this age of “virtual everything,” do we leave any trace of our daily personal lives that future archaeologists will discover and use for discerning what is important to us? Put your smart device in a drawer today and go outside to walk around in some mud in the hope that someday, just by chance preservation, some trace of your personal existence will endure.**
*Summary at: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-archaeology-fossilized-footprints-ancient-humans.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG Accessed on May 20, 2020. See Hatala, K.g., Harcourt-Smith, W.E.H., Gordon, A.D. et al. Snapshots of human anatomy, locomotion, and behavior from Late Pleistocene footprints at Engare Sero, Tanzania. Sci Rep 10, 7740 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64095-0
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG In 1835, more than a century before Mary Leakey and other archaeologists began studying hominin and hominid footprints to discern something about our past, Prof. Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College began studying dinosaur footprints. Since that time paleontologists have examined footprints millions of years old to infer dinosaur behavior. Hitchcock accumulated a large collection of tracks, mostly from the Connecticut River Valley. His collection appears to have been a lifetime’s work so carefully preserved that some slabs with prints have been turned into “three-ring books” much like a modern notebook binder. For a long time, the prints were stored for limited viewing in the basement of the Pratt Museum (an old gym) on campus, a basement that I visited often with college students. In 2006 the collection was moved into the Beneski Museum of Natural History, and access to the footprints is now far more limited than it was during the many years of my visits with students, when the curator simply said, “Sure, go take a look in the basement.” Not too far away, however, lies the footprint museum at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, a public facility that affords an opportunity to look into that deep past when bipedal organisms were reptilian and avian, rather than mammalian. At Rocky Hill, the footprints are ascribed arguably to a dinosaur species called Dilophosaurus, and its three-toed footprints are called Eubrontes. As they are classified, all footprints, burrows, and slide marks are called trace fossils. In the absence of physical remains, they are indirect, but very sound evidence, of life.
Going nowhere and accumulating steps is part of modern life. But, then, maybe it was always a part of hominin and hominid life, even though I imagine very long ago, long before agriculture and the rise of cities, that most walking was governed by needs for food, safety, and maybe privacy (“I’ve just gotta get out of this cave”). In these days, those smart devices we carry keep track of our steps for us because, for the most part, in all that walking over concrete, asphalt, and other hard artificial surfaces, we leave no footprints. If I extrapolate my daily step count to elsewhere and others, then millions of people daily walk billions of steps just in New York City without leaving a single track, unless they trek through Central Park or check their digital path.
For future archaeologists, the remnant roads and sidewalks will indicate both the human presence in our time and the direction of our ambulating lives: “Look they laid out the concrete paths in perpendicular patterns. Obviously, these people had assigned some ritualistic meaning to walking north and south versus east and west.” And even though there are more people alive than at any one time in the past, there might in our artificial world be just as small a chance at footprint preservation as there was when bipedalism arose in hominins whose fossilized tracks are gems in the archaeological record.
For our very ancient ancestors’ ambulating, archaeologists can’t use sidewalk and road patterns to determine the direction of daily life. Rather, they rely on chance fossilizations of footprints, the most ancient of which were uncovered at Laetoli by Mary Leakey. In a new discovery of more recent, but still ancient, footprints made by Kevin Hatala and others in Engara Sero, Tanzania, over four hundred impressions in hardened volcanic ash has led the archaeologists to draw inferences about the footprint-makers, including their size, walking or running direction, and their gender.* The footprints run largely in a northeast-southwest pattern that suggests to me a purposeful movement across a “muddy” plain, possibly a temporary migration for water not unlike the movement of wildebeest on the Serengeti today or a more "permanent" movement to a new nomadic settlement.
But think about what I just wrote. I assumed the chance preservation of a set of footprints allows me and those archaeologists to hypothesize with some surety. Yet, with regard to my own invisible steps recorded on my smart watch or phone, I look back, not to thousands to millions of years ago, but to a single day’s daylight activity and do so without remembering or even surmising where I was going in all that walking. Was there a purpose in all my movement through the house, around the property, or in the neighborhood? Was I merely “stretching my legs”? Now I have to search my memory…Naw. Not worth the effort. It really doesn’t matter where I went to reach the number of steps my watch recorded. I really didn't go anywhere significant. That I walked around provides its own reward: Without having to grow my own food or search for water, I got off my rear and moved anyway. Gives me a sense of accomplishment, even pride. “Look at how many steps I took today. Descartes would be elated: 'I move; therefore, I exist.'”
Oh! What’s this affluent bipedal life come to? Counting steps just for the sake of counting steps? Believing that what hominins did for three million or more years just to survive is the same as ambling around a house and neighborhood or as walking through the aisles of a store or the hallways of a mall in search of “more”? Thinking that my electronic record of steps will elate future archaeologists upon their discovery of an extant and working smart device? How will they infer my lifestyle and motivations; how will they understand “my times”? “Hey, Charlie and Charlene, come over here and look at this gizmo. Says here that he walked 7,856 steps on Friday.”
Both and simultaneously, “But where was he going?”
In this age of “virtual everything,” do we leave any trace of our daily personal lives that future archaeologists will discover and use for discerning what is important to us? Put your smart device in a drawer today and go outside to walk around in some mud in the hope that someday, just by chance preservation, some trace of your personal existence will endure.**
*Summary at: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-archaeology-fossilized-footprints-ancient-humans.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG Accessed on May 20, 2020. See Hatala, K.g., Harcourt-Smith, W.E.H., Gordon, A.D. et al. Snapshots of human anatomy, locomotion, and behavior from Late Pleistocene footprints at Engare Sero, Tanzania. Sci Rep 10, 7740 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64095-0
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubrontes#/media/File:Dinosaur_State_Park_(Rocky_Hill,_CT)_-_prints.JPG In 1835, more than a century before Mary Leakey and other archaeologists began studying hominin and hominid footprints to discern something about our past, Prof. Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College began studying dinosaur footprints. Since that time paleontologists have examined footprints millions of years old to infer dinosaur behavior. Hitchcock accumulated a large collection of tracks, mostly from the Connecticut River Valley. His collection appears to have been a lifetime’s work so carefully preserved that some slabs with prints have been turned into “three-ring books” much like a modern notebook binder. For a long time, the prints were stored for limited viewing in the basement of the Pratt Museum (an old gym) on campus, a basement that I visited often with college students. In 2006 the collection was moved into the Beneski Museum of Natural History, and access to the footprints is now far more limited than it was during the many years of my visits with students, when the curator simply said, “Sure, go take a look in the basement.” Not too far away, however, lies the footprint museum at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, a public facility that affords an opportunity to look into that deep past when bipedal organisms were reptilian and avian, rather than mammalian. At Rocky Hill, the footprints are ascribed arguably to a dinosaur species called Dilophosaurus, and its three-toed footprints are called Eubrontes. As they are classified, all footprints, burrows, and slide marks are called trace fossils. In the absence of physical remains, they are indirect, but very sound evidence, of life.
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