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23,000-year-old footprint find rewrites the human history of America

By on Sunday, September 26, 2021

Human footprints found in New Mexico ( United States ) could be proof of the earliest human presence on the American continent.

23,000-year-old human footprints discovered in the southwestern United States suggest that settlements in North America predate the end of the ice age, which is supposed to have allowed this migration, according to a study published Thursday.

These tracks were left on the shore of a lake that is now dry and where there is now a desert in New Mexico, within White Sands National Park.

Over time, sediments covered the tracks and protected them until erosion uncovered them to the great delight of scientists.

“Many footprints appear to be teenagers and children. The footprintslarger, adult, are less frequent, “wrote the authors in the study published in the American journal Science.

Footprints of prehistoric animals, mammoths and wolves were also identified. Some, such as those of giant sloths, are even contemporary and close to those of humans on the shore of the lake.

Millennia earlier than thought

The finding is decisive for the debate on how Homo sapiens reached America, the last continent populated by our species. This is because the White Sands footprints “indicate that humans were present in the landscape at least 23,000 years ago, with an occupation record of approximately two millennia,” the study stressed.

For decades, the most widely accepted thesis has been that a settlement from Siberia crossed a land bridge – the current Bering Strait – to reach Alaska and then expand south.

Archaeological evidence, including spearheads used to kill mammoths, has long suggested a 13,500-year-old settlement associated with the so-called Clovis culture, named after a city in New Mexico, considered the oldest American culture. , from where the ancestors of the Amerindians descend.

This model of the “primitive Clovis culture” has been questioned for 20 years, by new discoveries that have pushed back the age of the first populations. But, in general, this date was not more than 16,000 years ago, after the end of “the last ice age.”

This episode of glaciation is crucial because it is commonly accepted that the polar ice caps that covered most of the northern part of the continent at this time made impossible, or in any case, made any human migration from Asia, through the Bering Strait or, at any rate, very difficult. as recent discoveries suggest, along the Pacific coast.

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