4,000-year-old footprints near Pompeii show people fleeing Mount Vesuvius eruption thousands of years before the famous one

A series of human and animal footprint impressions dot the light brown dirt — Prints made by humans and animals show how they fled the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1995 B.C.

(Image credit: Courtesy of Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Salerno e Avellino)

Ancient footprints made by people and animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been discovered near Pompeii. But these footprints are thousands of years older than the famous eruption in A.D. 79, revealing that people in the Naples area have dealt with volcanic catastrophes for millennia.

The newfound 4,000-year-old prints, as well as other archaeological finds, were uncovered during pipeline construction in an area southeast of Pompeii, according to a translated statement from the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Provinces of Salerno and Avellino.

Another track found in 2001 at Nola-Croce del Papa, an Early Bronze Age village that was destroyed by the Avellino eruption, "shows that a sudden, en masse evacuation of thousands of people occurred at the beginning of the eruption," according to a 2006 study in the journal PNAS. Most of the people who fled Nola-Croce del Papa probably survived, researchers concluded in the study, but their land was likely uninhabitable for centuries.

Kristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Kristina holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and an M.A. in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina, as well as a B.A. in Latin from the University of Virginia, and she was formerly a university professor and researcher. She has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing.