Researchers from Australia’s Curtin University have rescanned the Trachilos footprints in western Crete in 3D, as scientists stay split over whether an early human ancestor made them.
A Curtin team returned to the coastal site near Kissamos in May 2025 to take fresh scans and create a photo mosaic, according to a Curtin University project brief.
The university plans to share the data online through Sketchfab and augmented reality. That matters because the site normally stays covered for protection, the brief said. As a result, visitors cannot see the prints.
Curtin has not published any new conclusion on the age of the Trachilos footprints or on what made them.
Trachilos footprints age dispute
Polish palaeontologist Gerard Gierliński first noticed the tracks in 2002. In 2017, his team described them as possible hominin tracks about 5.7 million years old. That age would put a human-like walker outside Africa far earlier than expected.
In October 2021, a University of Tübingen team led by Uwe Kirscher and Madelaine Böhme dated the Trachilos footprints to about 6.05 million years ago in a study in Scientific Reports. Greek City Times reported that the Cretan tracks had been dated to more than six million years ago.
At the time, Kirscher said: “The tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) from Laetoli in Tanzania.”
A younger date proposed
Utrecht University geologists Willem Jan Zachariasse and Lucas Lourens challenged that age. In their November 2022 paper, they argued the rock layers formed in the Late Pliocene, about three million years ago.
By then, Crete was an island about 100 kilometres from the European mainland, they said. As a result, it lay out of reach of any hominins of that age.
Some scientists doubt the marks are footprints at all, the Utrecht paper noted. Others accept them as tracks but question whether a human-like maker could have made them. So the Trachilos footprints remain unconfirmed as hominin tracks.
The site has also suffered damage. Shortly after the 2017 publication, thieves chiselled eight prints out of the rock, the Curtin brief said. Greek City Times first covered the find in September 2017.
Source: Curtin University
Bill Giannopoulos
Junior Editor
Bill Giannopoulos is a Junior Editor at Greek City Times, covering Greek and international news, sport, and history.