They had language.

They had knowledge of the landscape that the footprints can only hint at — the knowledge that accumulates in a community that has been in a place for generations, that has watched the lake level rise and fall, that has learned where the good fishing is and where the dangerous animals gather and when the plants at the shore margin produce the seeds and berries that supplement the diet that the lake’s resources provide.

They were not primitives at the dawn of human consciousness.

They were people — fully human, cognitively modern, culturally complex — who lived in a landscape that they understood and that they were using in the purposeful, competent ways that the trackways document.

The footprints do not preserve the full complexity of their lives.

But they preserve enough to make clear that the lives were complex.