In fact the Nahoon site, reported in 1966, was the first hominin tracksite ever to be described.

The situation now is very different. It appears that people were not looking hard enough, or were not looking in the right places. Today the African tally for dated hominin ichnosites (a term that includes both tracks and other traces) older than 50,000 years stands at 14. These can conveniently be divided into an East African cluster (five sites) and a South African cluster from the Cape coast (nine sites). There are a further ten sites elsewhere in the world including the United Kingdom and the Arabian Peninsula.

We found that the sites ranged in age; the most recent dates back about 71,000 years. The oldest, which dates back 153,000 years, is one of the more remarkable finds recorded in this study: It is the oldest footprint thus far attributed to our species, Homo sapiens.

The new dates corroborate the archaeological record. Along with other evidence from the area and time period, including the development of sophisticated stone tools, art, jewelry, and harvesting of shellfish, it confirms that the Cape south coast was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved, and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.

There are significant differences between the East African and South African tracksite clusters. The East African sites are much older: Laetoli, the oldest, is 3.66 million years old and the youngest is 0.7 million years old. The tracks were not made by Homo sapiens, but by earlier species such as australopithecines, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus.