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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00:00An international team of researchers have been working at the White Sands National Park
00:07in New Mexico to determine the age of the footprint traces that occur so abundantly
00:12there.
00:13The human footprints are associated with Pleistocene megafauna and are found on the margins and
00:18bed of what was a lake.
00:21David Bustos, resources manager at the park, explains.
00:25For years we've been seeing really incredible fossil footprints of mammoth and people and
00:30camels and giant ground sloth, all kinds of incredible megafauna alongside human prints
00:37throughout the park at different elevations.
00:41Sometimes the prints have been made of clay, sometimes made of dolomite, sometimes they
00:44were in a sandy material.
00:46For years we've been wondering how old are these human prints, are they as old as the
00:50megafauna?
00:52To address the age of the footprint traces, a new excavation was made in January 2020
00:58to reveal the stratigraphic context of the footprint layers.
01:01Kathleen Springer, working with Jeff Pigatti, both of the US Geological Survey, undertook
01:07the dating, as described by Kathleen.
01:10Our work involved a detailed stratigraphic analysis of the individual layers of this
01:16ancient lake that the human footprints are found in, and then dating the abundant seeds
01:22that occur on all of these horizons with radiocarbon.
01:26The significance of the site and work is outlined by Vance Holliday from the University of Arizona.
01:32It is now the oldest well-documented archaeological site in the Americas, with evidence of human
01:38activity from about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago.
01:43That was during the last ice age in New Mexico.
01:47I'm Dan Otis from the National Park Service.
01:50This discovery is important because it confirms that humans were in North America much earlier
01:54than many people believe.
01:57Unlike other sites where people disagree about whether broken stones and bones are products
02:01of human action, or they worry that younger artifacts might somehow have been introduced
02:06into older deposits, what we have at White Sands National Park are stratified layers
02:11containing indisputably human tracks alongside those of extinct ice age mammals.