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Shoeprints

In 1959, joint Russian-Chinese paleontological expedition under the direction of Dr. Chou Ming Chen, discovered in the Gobi Desert of central Asia the fossilised print of a shoe with a ribbed sole. The find appears in sandstone dated at 15 million years. Members of the expedition who carefully examined the shoe-print were quick to recognise that it was not the footmark of any animal, for the ribbing was too straight and regular to be of natural origin.

On January 25, 1927, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp was descending a small hill in the canyon, when he spotted the fossil laying topside up among a pile of loose rocks. He picked up the find, and took it home with him. Upon closer examination, Knapp was astounded to discover, "it is a layer from the heel of a shoe which had been pulled up from the balance of the heel by suction, the rock being in a plastic state at the time." The shoe print was in a marvellous state of preservation - the edges of the heel were smooth and rounded off as if cut, and its right side appeared more worn than the left - suggesting it had been worn on the right foot. But what Knapp found really amazing was that the rock in which the heel mark was made, was Triassic limestone - 225 million years old - which runs in a belt through the canyon hills he had been exploring. An expert geologist at the Rockefeller Foundation, who confirmed Knapp’s analysis, later examined the rock. The presence of minute crystals of sulphide of mercury throughout spaces in the fossil also testified to it being of great antiquity.

In 1885, Professor J.F. Brown of Berea College, Kentucky was called upon to examine a puzzling find, made 16 miles east of the town of Berea, on Big Hill in Rock Castle County, one of the spurs of the Cumberland Plateau. Near the summit, an old wagon trail cut through a stratum of carboniferous limestone and removal of earth to widen the trail into a road had exposed a new section of this stratum. As E.A. Allen reported in the American Antiquarian, volume 7, page 39, preserved in the layer were the fossilised impressions of several creatures. What mystified those who witnessed the remains was that among these tracks were two well-preserved prints of a human being. They were described as "good-sized, toes well spread, and very distinctly marked."