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Human footprints in Jackson County, Kentucky USA)

In 1885, a Professor J F Brown of Berea College (Kentucky, USA) discovered a set of apparently human footprints among those of other creatures in a road cutting at Big Hill, Jackson County (also Kentucky). The deposit in which they were found was a limestone apparently dated to the Carboniferous Era; they were described as being “good-sized, toes well spread, and very distinctly marked” (A E Allen in Transactions of the American Antiquarian 7 (1885), 39). The real problem for this observation is that the prints of other creatures included some identified as a bear and something resembling a large horse; mammals did not exist at the time the deposit was supposedly laid down and one must ask whether they were definitely in the limestone or in a more recent but heavily compacted soil above it or even whether they were simulacra (natural objects that resemble other things) rather than genuine prints.

This page was last updated on 7 May 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews