Long-term monitoring along the Irish Sea coast of Britain at Formby has identified hundreds of animal and human footprints in 31 discrete sediment beds. A new programme of radiocarbon dating shows that the Formby footprints span at least 8,000 years of the Holocene Epoch from the Mesolithic period to Medieval times. In a landscape largely devoid of conventional archaeology and faunal records, we show how species data from the footprint stratigraphy document long-term change in both large mammal diversity and human behaviour. The footprint beds record shifting community structure in the native fauna through an era of profound global change. As sea levels rose rapidly in the Early Holocene, men, women and children formed part of rich Mesolithic intertidal ecosystems from ~9,000 to 6,000 cal bp, with aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, beaver, wolf and lynx. Doggerland was reclaimed by the sea in this period. In the agriculture-based societies that followed, after 5,500 cal bp human footprints dominate the Neolithic period and later beds, alongside a striking fall in large mammal species richness. Stacked footprint beds can form multimillennial records of ecosystem change with precise geographical context that cannot be retrieved from site-based fossil bone assemblages.

福姆比沿英国爱尔兰海沿岸进行的长期监测已在 31 个离散沉积层中发现了数百个动物和人类足迹。一项新的放射性碳测年计划显示，福姆比足迹跨越了从中石器时代到中世纪的全新世至少 8,000 年。在很大程度上缺乏传统考古学和动物记录的景观中，我们展示了足迹地层学中的物种数据如何记录大型哺乳动物多样性和人类行为的长期变化。足迹床记录了在全球深刻变革的时代，本土动物群落结构的变化。随着全新世早期海平面迅速上升，男人、女人和儿童形成了丰富的中石器时代潮间带生态系统的一部分，水位大约为 9,000 至 6,000 cal bp ，其中有野牛、马鹿、狍子、野猪、海狸、狼和山猫。在此期间，多格兰被海水填海。在随后的以农业为基础的社会中，5,500 cal bp之后，人类足迹在新石器时代和后来的地层中占据主导地位，同时大型哺乳动物物种的丰富度也急剧下降。堆叠的足迹床可以形成生态系统变化的数千年记录，并具有精确的地理背景，而这些记录无法从基于现场的化石骨骼组合中检索。