1. On this day 112 years ago, a team of construction workers in Toronto made one of the most extraordinary discoveries in the entire history of the city.

2. It was 1908. Toronto was booming. More than 200,000 people now called the city home. The first skyscrapers towered above the downtown core, streetcars rattled through rush hour, and horses were just beginning to give way to cars.

3. Construction was everywhere: new train tracks, telephone wires, sewers and streetlamps were being installed all over.

And at the bottom of the harbour, 11 metres beneath the surface of the water, city workers were building a tunnel for a water pipe.

4. One winter day, not long before Christmas, the work came to a sudden halt. They’d found something remarkable down there on the bottom of the lake, near the Toronto Islands just east of Hanlan’s Point — something that had sat in that place, undisturbed, for thousands of years.

5. Eleven thousand years ago, Lake Ontario was much smaller than it is today. The water level was considerably lower, so the shoreline was 5km further south.

The area where Toronto now stands was a vast plain of subarctic tundra and spruce forest.

6. The last ice age had just ended, and as the enormous continental glacier that covered the land retreated, great prehistoric beasts moved in.

Mammoths and mastodons, ancient caribou, musk ox, and bison roamed the place where lawyers, accountants, and shopkeepers do today.

7. With them came the Paleoamericans, ancestors of today’s Indigenous people, nomadic hunters with stoned-tipped spears. Archaeologists believe they were the first human beings to set foot on this land — thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years before Toronto was founded.

8. And on one particular day, a family walked across the place where a city of millions would eventually be built.

They were heading north up from the lake, wearing moccasins, and — for at least a few steps — they walked through clay, leaving their footprints behind.

9. Over the next few thousand years, the lake grew, filling with water until it became the Lake Ontario we know today. And those hundred footprints, preserved in that clay, were hidden from view.

That is, at least, until 1908 when those city workers discovered them.

10. “It looked like a trail,” a city inspector told the Toronto Evening Telegram. “You could follow one man the whole way. Some footprints were on top of the others, partly obliterating them. There were footprints of all sizes, and a single print of a child’s foot.”

11. It was easily one of the most spectacular archaeological finds in Toronto’s history — heck, the history of the entire Great Lakes — quite possibly the earliest physical evidence of humans ever found in the city.

12. But Toronto, as it so often is, was in a rush in 1908. The city wanted to build a tunnel & didn’t want to slow down. People didn't place much importance in the history of this place — especially its Indigenous history.

13. The workers simply poured concrete over their find. After being miraculously preserved for 11,000 years, those precious, extraordinary footprints were gone in an instant.

And the men got back to work.

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