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Volunteers Step Up for Footprint Experiment

4 May 2007

BU Professor Matthew Bennett has enlisted the help of over 200 volunteers as part of research into ancient footprints.

The volunteers, of varying sex, age and build, have walked a short distance barefoot across a bed of sand to enable Professor Bennett and his colleagues to analyse the footprints.

Each ‘trail’ is photographed and laser scanned, with each volunteer anonymously giving their weight and height measurement at the end of the exercise.

Professor Bennett, Head of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at BU’s School of Conservation Sciences, is compiling a database of different foot impressions to help with his study of ancient footprints, which has taken him, most notably, to Mexico.

In the field, Professor Bennett uses a laser scanning technique to study footprints in 3-dimensions.

In the lab, he is developing a series of 3-dimensional footprint descriptors and will use the volunteers’ footprints to demonstrate how these descriptors link to a range of biometric information.

These statistical relationships are normally based on 2-dimensional footprint data.

“It is possible to infer a variety of biometric data from ancient footprints using a series of statistical relationships which link foot size to such things as height and weight,” he explains.

“These statistical inferences are also used at modern day crime scenes to profile suspects from footwear evidence.”

In 2005, Professor Bennett and colleagues from Liverpool John Moores University revealed that ancient human footprints they’d discovered in central Mexico were around 40,000 years old.

The news shattered previous theories of how –and when - humans first colonised the Americas.