“The art of tracking may well be the origin of science.” This is the departure point for a 2013 book by Louis Liebenberg, co-founder of an organisation devoted to environmental monitoring.
The connection between tracking in nature, as people have done since prehistory, and “western” science is of special interest to us as ichnologists. (Ichnology is the study of tracks and traces.) We learned our skills relatively late in life. But imagine if we had learned as children and if, as adults, we tracked as if our lives depended on it? What additional visual and cognitive talents would we bring to our field work as scientists?
Our mission is to find and document the fossilised tracks and traces of creatures that existed during part of the Pleistocene Epoch, between 35,000 and 400,000 years ago, on the Cape coast of South Africa. Since 2008, through the Cape South Coast Ichnology project, based in the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University, more than 370 vertebrate tracksites have been identified. They have substantially complemented the traditional record of body fossils. Examples include trackways of giant tortoises and giraffe.
