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A view of the Neanderthal trackway discovered on the northern cliff of Monte Cl\u00e9rigo beach in Portugal, with two study authors for scale. | Credit: Carlos Neto de Carvalho (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)<\/p>\n
Just before the first COVID lockdown in March 2020, Carlos Neto de Carvalho<\/a> and his wife, Yilu Zhang, were walking along Monte Cl\u00e9rigo beach in southern Portugal. As the geologist and geographer couple scrambled over rocky outcrops and an old collapsed cliff, they stumbled on a series of ancient Neanderthal<\/a> footprints.<\/p>\n “It was early in the morning of a sunny day, with perfect light for checking tracks,” Neto de Carvalho told Live Science in an email. But when they brought colleagues back to the site to take photos of the tracks, “we were almost trapped by the sudden rise of the tide and needed to swim and climb a 15-meter [49 feet] nearly vertical cliff with all our gear,” Neto de Carvalho said.<\/p>\n Their daring adventure paid off. The researchers ultimately discovered five trackways comprising 26 footprints at Monte Cl\u00e9rigo and, in turn, substantially increased experts’ understanding of Neanderthals’ activities along the Atlantic coast 78,000 years ago.<\/p>\n “The fossil record of hominin footprints, and especially the ones attributed to Neanderthals, is exceedingly rare,” Neto de Carvalho and colleagues wrote in a study published July 3 in the journal Scientific Reports<\/a>, since Neanderthal footprints are nearly identical to humans’.<\/p>\n In this case, the footprints were identified as Neanderthal because modern humans weren’t in Europe at that time. Rather, evidence suggests that besides a few earlier failed attempts<\/a>, Homo sapiens started leaving Africa around 50,000 years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n Only six sets of Neanderthal footprints had been discovered previously. Along with the Monte Cl\u00e9rigo tracks, the researchers have reported the new finding of a single footprint from Praia do Telheiro, also in southern Portugal, bringing the total number of Neanderthal trackways discovered in Europe<\/a> to eight.<\/p>\n At Monte Cl\u00e9rigo, the ancient footprints were made near the shoreline in a coastal dune. Optically stimulated luminescence<\/a> dating, which measures the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight, placed the footprints in the range of 83,000 to 73,000 years old.<\/p>\n Related: DNA of ‘Thorin,’ one of the last Neanderthals, finally sequenced, revealing inbreeding and 50,000 years of genetic isolation<\/a><\/p>\n Based on the size and shape of the Monte Cl\u00e9rigo prints, the researchers think an adult Neanderthal male walked up and down the dune, accompanied by a child between 7 and 9 years old and a toddler under 2 years old.<\/p>\n “The fact that in the context of Monte Cl\u00e9rigo infant footprints were found together with those of older individuals suggests that children were present when adults performed day-to-day activities,” the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n Because the trackways were heading both toward and away from the shore, these Neanderthals may have been foraging for food, such as shellfish. But another possibility is that the Neanderthals were practicing ambush hunting or stalking prey such as horses<\/a>, deer or hares, according to the researchers, since some of the Neanderthal footprints were “overprinted” with large mammal tracks.<\/p>\n RELATED STORIES<\/p>\n \u2014Endurance athletes that carry Neanderthal genes could be held back from reaching their peak<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014125,000-year-old ‘fat factory’ run by Neanderthals discovered in Germany<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Side-by-side](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/b14aa49cb987956af139aee7c08e7cf6.jpeg\"\/)
Depth map (left) and dimensional map (right) based on 3D models of trackways found at Monte Cl\u00e9rigo beach in Portugal. | Credit: Carlos Neto de Carvalho (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)<\/a><\/p>\n