Footage shows how researchers discovers 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
00:00An international team of researchers have been working at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico to determine the age of the footprint traces that occur so abundantly there.
00:13The human footprints are associated with Pleistocene megafauna and are found on the margins and bed of what was a lake.
00:21David Bostos, Resources Manager at the park, explains.
00:25For years we've been seeing really incredible fossil footprints of mammoth and people and camels and giant ground sloths,
00:32all kinds of incredible megafauna alongside human prints throughout the park at different elevations.
00:40Sometimes the prints would be made of clay, sometimes made of dolomite, sometimes they were in a sandy material.
00:46For years we've been wondering, how old are these human prints? Are they as old as the megafauna?
00:52To address the age of the footprint traces, a new excavation was made in January 2020 to reveal the stratigraphic context of the footprint layers.
01:01Kathleen Springer, working with Jeff Pegatti, both of the U.S. Geological Survey, undertook the dating, as described by Kathleen.
01:10Our work involved a detailed stratigraphic analysis of the individual layers of this ancient lake that the human footprints are found in,
01:19and then dating the abundant seeds that 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.
01:31It is now the oldest well-documented archaeological site in the Americas with evidence of human activity 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 than many people believe.
01:56Unlike other sites, where people disagree about whether broken stones and bones are products of human action,
02:02or they worry that younger artifacts might somehow have been introduced into older deposits,
02:07what we have at White Sands National Park are stratified layers containing indisputably human tracks alongside those of extinct ice age mammals.
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