[If dates hold, tracks would put people in New Mexico thousands of
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HUMAN FOOTPRINTS SUGGEST SURPRISINGLY EARLY ARRIVAL IN THE AMERICAS
 
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Lizzie Wade
September 23, 2021
Science Magazine
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_ If dates hold, tracks would put people in New Mexico thousands of
years earlier than thought _

These footprints in New Mexico might rewrite the history of the
peopling of the Americas,

 

Between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, people squished through the mud
along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico, alone and in small
groups, leaving behind their footprints. Or at least that’s the
conclusion of a new paper that Oregon State University, Corvallis,
archaeologist Loren Davis calls “potentially groundbreaking.” If
the dates are right, the discovery would be the strongest evidence yet
that people reached the Americas during the middle of the last ice
age, thousands of years earlier than many archaeologists thought.

“If that’s true … it’s going to be a revolution in the way
that we think about archaeology in the Americas,” says Davis, who
wasn’t involved with the work. It might reignite debates about how
people first reached the continent from Asia. But Davis and others
would like corroboration of the surprising dates before they rewrite
their understanding of when and how people arrived.

During the maximum extent of the last ice age, from about 26,500 to
19,000 years ago, land connected Russia and Alaska, allowing people to
settle the now mostly submerged region archaeologists call Beringia.
But glaciers covered much of Canada, blocking the way south into
what’s now the continental United States and beyond. Archaeologists
once thought the first people arrived in the Americas by walking
through a corridor that opened between the glaciers by about 13,500
years ago. In recent decades, however, data from multiple
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suggested people were in the Americas at least 16,000 years ago,
leading many researchers to suspect that the first arrivals skirted
the ice by traveling down the Pacific coast by boat.
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A smattering of sites have hinted at even older dates, but the claims
have been controversial. For example, last year a _Nature _paper
argued that humans left artifacts in a highland cave in Zacatecas,
Mexico
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at least 27,000 years ago, but many archaeologists doubt the fractured
rocks are stone tools.

Footprints are “a whole different level of evidence,” says Ciprian
Ardelean, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas
who discovered the cave there. “When you have human feet printed on
the ground, that’s undeniable.”

Over years of fieldwork in White Sands National Park in New Mexico,
researchers have found thousands of footprints left by humans and
animals around a now-dry lakebed, including extinct megafauna such as
mammoths and ground sloths. The new paper, published today
in Science, focuses on 60 human footprints
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layers of sediment, like a “palimpsest of people walking over a long
period of time,” says Matthew Bennett, an ancient footprint expert
at Bournemouth University. Based on the sizes of those prints, he
thinks most were left by teenagers and children who were perhaps
fetching water or just passing the time. “People spend a lot of time
playing. And what better place to play than the edge of a lake?”
says team member Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at the National Park
Service.

“There is no doubt that these are human footprints,” says Kevin
Hatala, an ancient footprint expert at Chatham University. Jennifer
Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas,
Lawrence, agrees. “So the question is then, how old are they?”

To find out, the researchers radiocarbon dated seeds embedded in
several layers of earth between the footprints. The dating put the
seeds between about 23,000 and 21,000 years old, during the height of
glaciation. If the footprints are that old, people must have made it
to the Americas before ice sheets blocked the path, meaning an early
land journey might have been possible.

“We kept trying to refute our own findings,” Odess says, for
example checking that the ancient lake water’s chemistry didn’t
skew the dates. “And it kept coming back as yeah, they really are
that old.”

“From the dating perspective I think the authors have done a very
sound job,” says Tom Higham, a leading radiocarbon dating expert at
the University of Oxford.

But Davis suggests a nagging possibility: that the seeds are older
than the footprints because they eroded out of older sediments, then
sifted into the mud the team excavated. He’d like to see the team
try optically stimulated luminescence dating, a method that reveals
when quartz grains were last exposed to light, to date when the
sediment around the footprints was buried. “With something so
extraordinary, it would be nice if we had multiple lines of
evidence,” agrees archaeologist Ben Potter of Liaocheng University.

So far, the team has found no artifacts that could shine a light on
the culture of the people who left the footprints. But Kim Charlie, an
enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico, feels a deep
connection. “Thousands and thousands of years ago, our ancestors
walked this place,” says Charlie, who has visited the footprints and
even uncovered some herself. Seeing prints of humans together with
extinct megafauna such as camels sheds light on why the Acoma language
has a word for “camel,” she says.

Odess says White Sands bolsters other traces of early occupation of
the Americas. The prints “make all those other [very ancient] sites
more plausible,” he says.

But Potter thinks each site “needs to stand and fall on its own
merits.” White Sands, he says, is “one of the stronger cases for a
very early occupation. It’s not definitive. But it’s stronger.”

_Author: Lizzie is Science's Latin America correspondent, based in
Mexico City. mail
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