High on the escarpment of the copper-coloured cliff overlooking Lake Baringo in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, are a series of ancient footprints found on a volcanic ash rock that had long lain under the water of a stream.

The stream is now dying out and the receding water has exposed the edges of the stream bed where the rock has been lying undisturbed for years.

The footprints were discovered in October 2008 by Kenneth Kimosop Rutto, who owns the land through which the stream runs.

“I was on my way to work,” said Rutto who works as head waiter at the luxurious holiday resort of Island Camp in Baringo. “On that day l found the footprints I had decided to follow the dry stream bed.” And then he saw the first series of footprints on an ash rock that was once under the stream. On closer inspection he knew that these were no ordinary footprints embedded in the earth. They belonged to ancient humans.

He was elated. And then he found the next set a few metres away in the thorn-filled scrub.

“It looks like whoever this was, had walked across the soft volcanic ash,” said Rutto, pointing them out to me. The scene is similar to the famous Laetoli footprints that date 3.7 million years ago and were discovered by Dr Mary Leakey in 1976 in Tanzania near the Ngorongoro Crater. The Laetoli are the world’s oldest known human footprints.

Laetoli is dated to the Plio-Pleistocene and famous for its hominin footprints, preserved in volcanic ash. It is located 45km south of Olduvai gorge. The Laetoli prints resemble modern human footprints, despite being almost four million years old.

Baringo volcanoes

According to information from Smithsonian volcanologists found online, the elongated Ol Kokwe Island in the centre of Lake Baringo southwest of Korosi volcano consists of young basaltic scoria cones that cap a trachytic shield volcano.

The volcano is the smallest in the northern part of the Kenyan Rift Valley. North-south-trending faults cut the complex, producing west-facing scarps. Smaller islands to the north and south are faulted basaltic lava flows. Parmalok Island to the southwest is a breached trachytic tuff cone that fed a small lava flow.

The latest eruptive activity at Ol Kokwe was estimated to have occurred within the past thousand years. Hot springs, boiling mud pools, and fumaroles are present along the faults on the northeast peninsula of the island and are frequently visited by tourists. There have been no recent eruptions or seismic activities recorded. Ol Kokwe is classified as a dormant volcano. The other smaller volcanoes are Paka and Korosi.

And because all the footprints found by Rutto are facing in one direction away from Ol Kokwe, they must have belonged to people fleeing from a possible volcano eruption. In addition, Rutto found a lion’s pug marks and footprints of wading birds embedded in the same grey volcanic ash rock.

Unsure whether anyone would take him seriously or even believe him, he however contacted the National Museums of Kenya in 2012. In May 2016, a team of researchers led by Dr Emmanuel Ndiema, head of archaeology at the museums’ of department of Earth Sciences visited the site.

“It’s an exciting discovery,” said Dr Ndiema. “There is no doubt that the footprints are ancient.”

An educated guess by the scientist is that the footprints belong to Homo erectus (upright man), a hominid that lived according to fossils found, between 70 thousand and 1.9 million years ago. Evidence points to H.erectus originating in Africa and then migrating to Eurasia.

Dr Ndiema said it could be of some other anatomically modern ancestor of Homo sapiens, that is modern man — from the spacing of the footprints which suggest upright walking.

“This presents tremendous potential for research, especially in linking them to the previous footprints reported further north at Ileret near Lake Turkana,” said the researcher.

The Ileret footprints were discovered in 2005 and have been dated as 1.5 million years old. The Ileret footprints have been extensively studied by Prof Jack Harris who is former chair in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University in the US and one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists studying the earliest stages of human origins.

He has done fieldwork on early hominid and archaeological sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zaire and Mozambique. His research interests include changing patterns of early hominid behaviour between 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago.

The Baringo footprints

The first set of footprints that Rutto found shows three people walking — five prints, eight prints and five again — walking fairly close together headed in the same direction. The next set of prints on higher ground is of three steps and then another two. They measure roughly 26 centimetres and on average the individuals took long strides that measure 76 centimetres apart.

Childhood interest

Rutto became interested in footprints as a child in his geography and history class. “When I was growing up, one day as I was sweeping my grandmother’s hut I saw a trail of animal footsteps embedded on the earth floor of the hut. I asked her what they were and she replied that she didn’t know but she thought they were very old prints of some animals and that there were many in the area.”

This sparked a life-long interest in Rutto. So during a history class in Primary 7, Rutto learned of the origins of mankind and about the famous fossil finder Dr Richard Leakey and his discoveries of ancient human fossils around Lake Turkana, farther north of Lake Baringo. Despite not being able to finish high school for lack of school fees, Rutto read the works of the Leakey family, the famous fossil finders.

“I asked myself, if there are human fossils, where are the footprints?

“So during my free time, wherever I walked, I looked out for human footprints.” It paid off on that fine day in October 2008.