Three early humans, fleeing down the steep slopes of an erupting volcano in southern Italy more than 325,000 years ago, left a record of their flight in the mountain's volcanic ash, and now modern scientists have traced their path for the first time.

The Stone Age-era tracks mark the oldest human footprints ever found, the scientists say, although fossilized prints of far earlier ancestors -- dating back more than 3 million years in the long hominid lineage -- were found in Tanzania by the famed Richard and Mary Leakey in 1977.

The newly identified tracks of the individuals in Italy may not add new evidence on the evolution of today's Homo sapiens, but they do tell a poignant story of what must have been a terrifying experience for the three early humans.

Their tracks were found nearly 1,000 feet up the side of Roccamonfino, a dormant volcano about 35 miles from what is now Naples. The volcano first erupted about 600,000 years ago and again continuously for 60 years beginning about 385,000 years ago. The tracks, with 56 footprints, were found imprinted in the vast outflow of volcanic ash from that second eruption, according to Paolo Mietto of Italy's University of Padua, the leader of the scientific group that analyzed the tracks.

Curiously, a few of the footprints had been reported by generations of inhabitants of the nearby village that bears the volcano's name. They called the prints "devil's trails," Mietto said. Along with the prints, scientists found fossils of small mammals.

A report by Mietto and his colleagues is being published today in the journal Nature.

"The idea that these humans were escaping an eruption of the volcano is supported by the fact that the tracks all have the same direction, outwards from the volcano's main crater," Mietto said. "It is reasonable to infer that they actually witnessed the explosive eruption."

The tracks indicate that the prehistoric people were racing furiously down the heavily forested slope, which at the time approached the vertical in spots -- about 80 degrees. Some of the footprints show deeply indented heel marks flanked on either side by the imprints of hands that must have been trying to prevent a fall, Mietto said.

In one place a set of prints makes a sharp zig-zag, is if the individual were moving sideways across the slope to avoid an impassable stretch of steep rock, while another shows the imprint of a long deep gouge where the person was sliding down the steep slope for more than two feet.

Based on the size of the footprints -- less than 4 inches wide and 8 inches long -- Mietto and his colleagues estimate that they must have been barely five feet tall.

The scientists speculated that the individuals might have belonged to the early human species known as Homo erectus, or perhaps another known as Homo heidelbergensis.

However, two U.S. specialists in the origins of early Europeans, who found the Mietto report interesting evidence of a long-ago perilous incident, said it would not be possible to classify precisely the people who left the footprints.

According to Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Geoffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittburgh, all one can say about their identity is that they were clearly "bipedal hominids" and might even have belonged to a species of early humans as yet unidentified.