Archaeologists have made amazing discoveries about American history, and it’s all because of footprints.
Human footprints unearthed in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park are the oldest ever found on the continent.
Scientists had previously estimated their ages to be between 11,500 and 13,000 years old, but new analysis has found that the oldest one is actually 23,000 years old.
This means humans lived in North America at least 10,000 years earlier than experts thought. And in fact, experts say they may have arrived even earlier, at the end of the last Ice Age, more than 32,000 years ago.
“The New Mexico site has rewritten the history books,” lead researcher Sally Reynolds, a paleoecology researcher at Bournemouth University, said in a statement.
“These footprints provide a valuable window into what kind of lives our ancestors led and how similar they may have been to us,” she added, explaining that they revealed “fantastic examples of human activity” and how humans “were interacting and interacting with the landscape and the animals that inhabit it.”
Footprints are the oldest known evidence of humans in North America (NPS, USGS, Bournemouth University)
Indeed, what makes these prints remarkable is not just their age, but the fact that they provide an unprecedented glimpse into life at that time.
From children splashing in puddles to a group of hunters hunting a giant sloth, these 23,000-year-old footprints tell a story of the Pleistocene past.
These were made by people walking on the damp ground at the edge of a dry lake, and while some are visible to the naked eye today, others can only be identified using ground-penetrating radar.
Matthew Bennett, also from Bournemouth University and lead author of two scientific papers on footprints, told the Smithsonian that there are ancient human footprints in Africa and that there are ancient human footprints in Africa and other parts of the world. He said he knows there are human footprints, but none of them “tell such a vivid and relatable story.”
His first paper, published in the journal Science in 2021, detailed how the footprints captured a perilous journey made by what appeared to be a small woman or girl trotting along the muddy lake shore with a child on her hip.
“There were hungry predators around, including dire wolves and saber-toothed cats,” Bennett told the Smithsonian.
“You can see there are a few places where they’ve slipped in the mud. […] A child’s footprint can also be seen where she left it. Perhaps he was tired and needed a break. ”
Judging by the size of the tracks, the pup was under three years old and was not accompanied by an older female on the journey home.
The question then arises as to what happened to the child. Did the woman drop her child off at the campsite? And why was the child walking among the dangerous animals on the slippery shore?
“There’s no way to know,” Bennett acknowledged, “but if you’ve ever rushed somewhere important with a tired toddler in tow, you’ve probably experienced a very similar feeling” — even if you weren’t constantly looking over your shoulder for sabre-toothed tigers.
The footprints were discovered in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, which was once home to a large lake. (NPS)
“The footprints left at White Sands tell us how the teens were interacting with younger children and adults,” Bennett said in a separate statement.
“You can think of our ancestors as being very functional, hunting and surviving, but what we see here is an activity of play and also a coming together of different eras. These A real insight into the early people.”
The Bournemouth University scientist also says that while the footprints offer an interesting glimpse into what life was like in North America 23,000 years ago, he and his team are now discovering how humans got there in the first place. He emphasized that he wanted to know whether he had done so.
“We need more sites to understand where they came from and what route they took,” Bennett told the Smithsonian.
“The lasting legacy of White Sands is to point the way to an archive of new evidence.”
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