A 2021 study of these fossilized footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico showed that humans were living in the Americas roughly 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. New research from the University of Arizona supports those 2021 findings.
Tuscon.com has a story about the oldest evidence of human occupation in North America. A 2021 study from the University of Arizona revealed data that dated fossilized footprints from White Sands National Park to 23,000 year ago. This was controversial as the previously excepted oldest human evidence was 17,000 before present. Most of the criticism was associated with the use of grass seeds and pollen excavated at the site to determine the approximate age of the footprints. Now, a new study analyzed mud deposits surrounding the original dig site to arrive at a similar age. The research was published recently in the journal Science Advances.
“We started doing the radiocarbon dating on the material, and it just matched right up with the tracks,” said Holliday, a professor emeritus in the university’s School of Anthropology who has studied the “peopling of the Americas” for nearly 50 years. “We now have three different sources of carbon tested in three different labs, and all the dates match up nicely.”
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The human tracks at White Sands were left along the bed of a tributary to what scientists call paleolake Otero, a Pleistocene body of water that once filled the valley where the park’s famous dunes now stand.
Holliday said the desiccated wetland also contains the fossilized footprints of several now-extinct large mammals common in North America until the end of the last ice age. There are “tracks all over the place” left by mammoths, dire wolves and giant ground sloths, he said.
