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00:03 Just a couple of years ago, these footprints were found in White Sands, a desert in New Mexico.
00:08 They are obviously human and make, but even when they were discovered in 2021,
00:12 experts knew they were special, as they were thought to be the oldest signs of humans in North America.
00:17 Now, researchers have confirmed their age, finding that they are indeed the oldest signals of humanity
00:22 on the continent, and that they are 21,500 years old. That means they were here during the last
00:28 glacial maximum, a period during the Pleistocene Epoch. During that time, sea levels were a whopping
00:33 400 feet lower than today, and 25% of all land on Earth was covered in glaciers. Researchers
00:39 initially confirmed the age of the footprints by radiocarbon dating seeds that were embedded in the
00:44 prints, then going back and doing the same with pollen that was discovered on the same sedimentary
00:48 levels, which corroborated those numbers. They went through exhaustive measures to date the prints,
00:53 as many people couldn't believe that humans were in North America that early, with their researchers
00:57 writing about their findings, "The immediate reaction in some circles of the archaeological
01:02 community was that the accuracy of our dating was insufficient to make the extraordinary claim
01:06 that humans were present in North America during the last glacial maximum."
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