Huck made his way to the nearby river to get his daughter. She’d gone there with other children for a swim. They did that nearly every day in summer. Today however, Huck went down to the river for a reason; his wife had collapsed and died suddenly while preparing lunch. Huck went to the river to tell his daughter the sad news and to bring her home.
Together, hand in hand, they walked back to their house. Mummy has died very suddenly. Everything is going to be fine. They crossed barefoot through the swamp that bordered the river. They crossed through the stretch of long grass. They passed through the plantation of trees. They reached home. Everything is going to be fine.
“These footprints preserved in rock,” said the palaeontologist 49,000 years later, “are the footprints of a primitive adult male and child. They were in a hurry. It’s possible to imagine these footprints being made by a father teaching his son how to ferociously hunt and kill.”