Fossilized Human Footprints Found In New Mexico

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

00:11 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.

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