Gerard Gierlinski’s trip to the Greek island of Crete in 2002 was meant to be a romantic getaway for him and his girlfriend. But it ended up becoming considerably more momentous than that — leading to a discovery that could dramatically alter the story of the human race.

It was Gierlinski’s first time on the island, a popular holiday destination for Poles like himself. He and his partner, Beata Piechik, were there to walk the sandy beaches, swim in the Mediterranean Sea and enjoy food and wine in the quiet tourist village of Trachilos, which is dotted with small houses and a handful of hotels.

“It’s an amazing, beautiful area,“ Gierlinski recalled. But being a paleontologist at the Polish Geological Institute, Gierlinski was also prepared to record any discoveries he might make.

“I always carry — even on vacation — a hammer, a camera and a GPS,” he said.

So when he spotted an odd imprint in a rock along the beach, he was ready.

Gierlinski has studied dinosaur tracks and recognized the indentation as a footprint. And there were others. It was around noon, and the sunlight was too harsh to enable him to see the full details of the impressions — but he could immediately tell that they weren’t dinosaur tracks. He took a number of photographs of the imprints (including one with Piechik sitting on the rock). And, crucially, he captured the GPS co-ordinates, so he could find the place again.

'This was like a shock for me.'

They eventually headed back home from their idyllic holiday, but Gierlinski couldn’t get those prints out of his head. For eight years, he wondered about them. In 2010, he found a good deal on an all-inclusive package and went back to Crete — and felt compelled to return to that spot. (By this time, he had broken up with Piechik.)

It was almost evening when he revisited that flat slab on the beach, one that tourists often sit on as they drink and gaze out at the sea. This time, the long shadows clearly revealed the outline of the footprints — prints that clearly resembled the shape of his own foot.

“This was like a shock for me,” Gierlinski said.

He eventually brought in other experts from Poland, as well as from Sweden, Greece, the U.S. and England, to help him analyze the footprints and the sediments surrounding them. Together, they determined the tracks were left by ancient human relatives 5.6 million years ago. That would make them the oldest human-like footprints in the world — two million years older, in fact, than the oldest found in Africa, long considered the “cradle of humankind.”

Gierlinski said it could suggest an unexpected and untold part of the story of where humans came from. “It’s a new frontier in the study of our ancestors,” he said.

The footprints appear more clearly in this photo, after the surface was cleaned in November 2010 by Gierlinski and his colleagues Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Andrzej Boczarowski. (Submitted by Gerard Gierlinski)

The footprints appear more clearly in this photo, after the surface was cleaned in November 2010 by Gierlinski and his colleagues Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Andrzej Boczarowski. (Submitted by Gerard Gierlinski)

The footprints have suffered a number of indignities since the discovery — from being sprayed with graffiti to being chiselled from the rock and stolen. But the bigger scandal may be the reception Gierlinski and his colleagues faced after they first reported their find.

No pre-human fossils that old have ever been found in Europe, and Gierlinski’s claim generated vicious criticism and disbelief from other scientists in a field where most influential researchers are committed “Africanists.”

Per Ahlberg, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, was the member of Gierlinski’s team who took responsibility for getting the research published, and described the process as “six and a half years of sort of living hell.”

Gierlinski’s find casts a light not only on the often chance nature of scientific discovery, but the sometimes fierce conflict among the humans in the scientific community, who often bristle when their beliefs are challenged by new ideas — especially ones that may be ahead of their time.

Gerard Gierlinski presents a plaster replica of one of the Trachilos footprints during a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2017. (Tomasz Gzell/EFE/EPA)