The discovery of ancient human footprints in New Mexico could revolutionize how researchers study human migration on the continent. They are the oldest human prints ever discovered in North America.
They were originally found in 2009 in a dry, silty lakebed at White Sands National Park. Archaeologists say many were left by children and teenagers, right alongside the tracks of mammoths, dire wolves, giant ground sloths and other animals of the Late Pleistocene. Thousands more prints have since been found.
Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey radiocarbon-dated seeds imbedded in the footprints, revealing they were made between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. That places humans in what is now the Americas during at least the middle of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than researchers previously believed.
For decades, the widely held theory was that humans crossed a now-submerged land bridge connecting modern-day Russian and Alaska, and the discoveries of stone tools and other evidence place human arrival between 13,000 and 26,000 years ago. But footprints found in New Mexico have the possibility to put a more definitive timestamp on those broad estimates.
Scientists want to collect more data before they conclude such an early human habitation of the Americas. But they say it’s some of the most solid evidence ever unearthed to show that people roamed this continent at least tens of thousands of years ago.
