Evidence of crawling in an Italian cave system sheds new light on late Stone Age human behavior in groups, especially when exploring new grounds, says a study published today in eLife.

The Discovery of Ancient Human Crawling

The cave of Bàsura at Toirano and its human and animal fossil traces have been known since the 1950s, with the first studies conducted by Italian archaeologist Virginia Chiappella. In the current study, promoted by the Archaeological Heritage Office of Liguria, researchers from Italy, Argentina, and South Africa used multiple approaches to analyze the human traces and identified for the first time crawling behaviors from around 14,000 years ago.