Mystery of Ancient giants who left massive footprints stamped onto rocks across Africa
Big Foot or simply the Yeti?
When it comes to mystic giants, real or imaginary, Africa seems to have quite a number of them.
These larger than life mythical or maybe real creatures who are believed to have once walked across the continent have left behind what is being considered to be large feet imprints solidified on volcanic rocks
For instance, one such geological signature can be seen in South Africa.
A footprint measuring more than a meter long, pressed into solid granite.
The locals near Mpuluzi, Mpumalanga, call it the Footprint of God.
Others call it Goliath’s Footprint.
The Nguni legend tells of a giant woman, said to have been ten meters tall, who was running toward her lover when a volcanic eruption killed her and left her footprint preserved in the cooling lava.
It is a striking story.
And the rock itself happens to be real.
The formation sits in an outcrop of the Mpuluzi Batholith, granite that formed roughly 3.1 billion years ago, making it part of some of the oldest exposed crust on Earth.
But then again, this is where the science and the legend part ways.
Geologist Robert Schoch, who examined the formation in person, concluded that it is a natural erosional feature rather than an ancient footprint.
The popular version of the story also gets the geology badly wrong.
The figure of 200 million years sometimes attached to the site does not represent the age of a supposed footprint. The granite is vastly older, dating back billions of years.
When this rock formed, according to science, complex animals did not yet exist.
Life on Earth was still dominated by simple single-celled organisms.
So no, this formation is not evidence that giants once walked across South Africa.
What it is, is a remarkable natural feature around which local communities have preserved a powerful story.
More often than not, the truth is neither a hoax nor a myth confirmed.
Sometimes it is simply a beautiful rock and a beautiful story that were never actually about the same thing.
However, similar footprints are found in the central Kitui area in Kenya.
They are not the only ones in East Africa, others, well-defined footprints can be seen on the rocks of Mwanza and Shinyanga in the Tanzania lake zone.
That is in addition to ordinary footprints dating nearly 4 million years ago discovered by Mary Leakey in 1979 at the Laetoli site near Olduvai within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of Northern Tanzania.
Add that to the local folklore that a man known as ‘Marikino,’ once slew a giant in the remote Monduli wilderness of Arusha and somehow giants of Africa becomes more real than what science is ready to admit.