WELSH ATLANTIS

Sunken British Forest Resurfaces

Oldest footprints outside Africa found.

The sunken forest of Borth, Wales was first submerged over 5,000 years ago and has occasionally surfaced with the tides—but the storms and floods that hit Britain earlier this year have exposed a new chunk of the forest, complete with a quarter-mile-long saltwater channel that is providing new clues about where humans may have lived and how they coped with catastrophic climate change in the past. Footprints estimated to have been made as much as 1 million years ago were found, making them the oldest human footprints discovered outside Africa. “We used to think of this as just an impenetrable forest—actually this was a complex human environment,” said Martin Bates, a geoarchaeologist.