Experience based reading of Pleistocene human footprints in Pech-Merle

Human footprints in the painted cave of Pech-Merle, France, have been investigated by archaeologists since the 1920s with state-of-the-art methods of the given time. Science always provided tool kits to analyse the information about individuals imprinted into the ground. However, the old human method of expert track reading has first been employed on these tracks in 2013 (as in some other caves with preserved human tracks from the Pleistocene). This special knowledge was deployed by three trackers from the Ju/'hoansi-San in Namibia who enriched our knowledge on the tracks in Pech-Merle in two significant ways: five individuals were identified, aged from 9-10 to over 50 years, from both sexes and some footprints were found that hitherto had been overlooked. It turned out that the features crucial for their interpretation are congruent with those of morpho-metric measurements but their experience based interpretation is more fine-grained than an interpretation based on the available statistics alone. Accordingly it seems justified to introduce the two methods as complementary tools for archaeology, i.e. the established morpho-metric approach flanked by morpho-classificatory track reading.