Researchers have discovered fossil human footprints embedded in an ancient lakebed that show humans inhabited North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, in what is now New Mexico.
Credit: National Park Service, USGS and Bournemouth University
Credit: National Park Service, USGS and Bournemouth University
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00:00 An international team of researchers have been working at the White Sands National Park
00:07 in New Mexico to determine the age of the footprint traces that occur so abundantly
00:11 there. The human footprints are associated with Pleistocene megafauna and are found on
00:17 the margins and bed of what was a lake. David Bustos, Resources Manager at the park, explains.
00:25 For years we've been seeing really incredible fossil footprints of mammoth and people and
00:30 camels and giant ground sloth, all kinds of incredible megafauna alongside human prints
00:37 throughout the park at different elevations. Sometimes the prints have been made of clay,
00:42 sometimes made of dolomite, sometimes they were in a sandy material. For years we've
00:47 been wondering how old are these human prints, are they as old as the megafauna?
00:52 To address the age of the footprint traces, a new excavation was made in January 2020
00:57 to reveal the stratigraphic context of the footprint layers. Kathleen Springer, working
01:03 with Jeff Pagatti, both of the US Geological Survey, undertook the dating, as described
01:09 by Kathleen. Our work involved a detailed stratigraphic
01:12 analysis of the individual layers of this ancient lake that the human footprints are
01:18 found in and then dating the abundant seeds that occur on all of these horizons with radiocarbon.
01:25 The significance of the site and work is outlined by Vance Holliday from the University of Arizona.
01:32 It is now the oldest well documented archaeological site in the Americas with evidence of human
01:38 activity from about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago. That was during the last ice age in New
01:45 Mexico. I'm Dan Otis from the National Park Service.
01:50 This discovery is important because it confirms that humans were in North America much earlier
01:54 than many people believe. Unlike other sites where people disagree about whether broken
01:59 stones and bones are products of human action, or they worry that younger artifacts might
02:04 somehow have been introduced into older deposits, what we have at White Sands National Park
02:09 are stratified layers containing indisputably human tracks alongside those of extinct ice
02:15 age mammals.