The White Sands footprints just got a sharper date. Researchers isolated up to 75,000 pollen grains per sample and cut the radiocarbon uncertainty fivefold. The 152 measured footprints at White Sands National Park now sit between 23,500 and 21,700 years old, deep in the last Ice Age.
There's something extraordinary about looking at a footprint made more than 20,000 years ago and realizing that somebody was simply going about their day, completely unaware that we'd be examining the evidence thousands of generations later.
The possible travois marks are intriguing, too. We spend so much time discussing when people arrived in the Americas that it's easy to overlook what their everyday lives might actually have looked like.
And the idea that the landscape was changing noticeably within a single human lifetime makes these people seem considerably less remote.
Wonderful research, and thank you for bringing it to our attention!
INteresting. Glad to see that finally people start to believe there were humans in the Americas and probably without having to come from China. (no pun intended)
I'm in southern New Mexico, and Lake Otero is the white gypsum we all drive past now, so this one hit home. What got me was the model. Tracks only fossilize when rising water buries them at the right moment, so the footprint layers line up with the climate swings. That means what we've got is mostly the years the land was changing, and the calm years just washed away. Makes you wonder how much of the deep past reaches us that way. Great breakdown of the pollen vs Ruppia dating fight too.
The timeline of human history in the Americas continues to be extended further into the past.
I find these discoveries absolutely fascinating!
There's something extraordinary about looking at a footprint made more than 20,000 years ago and realizing that somebody was simply going about their day, completely unaware that we'd be examining the evidence thousands of generations later.
The possible travois marks are intriguing, too. We spend so much time discussing when people arrived in the Americas that it's easy to overlook what their everyday lives might actually have looked like.
And the idea that the landscape was changing noticeably within a single human lifetime makes these people seem considerably less remote.
Wonderful research, and thank you for bringing it to our attention!
Fascinating glimpses of ancestral life! Thank you.
INteresting. Glad to see that finally people start to believe there were humans in the Americas and probably without having to come from China. (no pun intended)
I'm in southern New Mexico, and Lake Otero is the white gypsum we all drive past now, so this one hit home. What got me was the model. Tracks only fossilize when rising water buries them at the right moment, so the footprint layers line up with the climate swings. That means what we've got is mostly the years the land was changing, and the calm years just washed away. Makes you wonder how much of the deep past reaches us that way. Great breakdown of the pollen vs Ruppia dating fight too.