00:02An international team of researchers have been working at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico to determine the
00:09age 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
00:19lake.
00:21David Bostos, Resources Manager at the park, explains.
00:24For years we've been seeing really incredible fossil footprints of mammoth and people and camels and giant ground sloths, all
00:32kinds 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
00:59context 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.
01:09And our work involved a detailed stratigraphic analysis of the individual layers of this ancient lake that the human footprints
01:18are found in, and 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.
01:32It is now the oldest well-documented archaeological site in the Americas with evidence of human activity from about 23
01:40,000 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.
01:49This 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
02:15age mammals.
02:16At that point, you don't see that huge pieces of cultural creatures of these,
02:16these these are highly creative.
02:16I have to admit, because of the planet of The Columnive .
02:16And indeed, we're going to focus on the universe for all of these tidbits.
02:16If we're going to focus on the planet, we're going to focus on the other planet,
02:16You
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