WASHINGTON, Aug 15: ``It had just rained when she walked through the sand, leaving three little footprints on her way downhill to the water. Her heel landed here and her arch curled up. That was 117,000 years ago, making the footprints the oldest ever found of an anatomically modern human,'' said paleontologist Lee Berger on Thursday.

The ancient footprints, discovered by geologist David Roberts, were preserved in a ledge of sandstone at the edge of Langebaan lagoon, near the Atlantic coast, in southwest South Africa about 60 miles north of Cape Town.

``The prints were made by a person who...looked just like us,'' Berger, who is currently studying ancient life forms at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told a news conference at the National Geographic Society. This raises the possibility that the person who left footprints in the sand so long ago is an ancestor of the humans living today, he added.

Roberts made the discovery in September 1995 after finding an ancient stone core whose flakes were used by early man for scouring and other tasks.

Paleontologists have long theorized about the existence of an Eve, a hypothetical common female ancestor who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago and carried a specific form of DNA genetic material passed on only through females.

``It is highly unlikely, of course, that the actual Eve made these prints but they were made at the right time on the right continent to be hers,'' Berger said.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.