Discovery Of Fossilized Human Footprints In An Ancient Lakebed

Live Science

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

Transcript

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

00:12 there.

00:13 The human footprints are associated with Pleistocene megafauna and are found on the margins and

00:18 bed of what was a lake.

00:21 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.

00:41 Sometimes the prints have been made of clay, sometimes made of dolomite, sometimes they

00:44 were in a sandy material.

00:46 For years we've been wondering how old are these human prints, are they as old as the

00:50 megafauna?

00:51 To address the age of the footprint traces, a new excavation was made in January 2020

00:58 to reveal the stratigraphic context of the footprint layers.

01:02 Kathleen Springer, working with Jeff Pagatti, both of the US Geological Survey, undertook

01:07 the dating, as described by Kathleen.

01:10 Our work involved a detailed stratigraphic analysis of the individual layers of this

01:16 ancient lake that the human footprints are found in and then dating the abundant seeds

01:22 that occur on all of these horizons with radiocarbon.

01:26 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.

01:43 That was during the last ice age in New Mexico.

01:46 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.

01:57 Unlike other sites where people disagree about whether broken stones and bones are products

02:01 of human action, or they worry that younger artifacts might somehow have been introduced

02:06 into older deposits, what we have at White Sands National Park are stratified layers

02:11 containing indisputably human tracks alongside those of extinct ice age mammals.

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