New research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, NM, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought. In September 2021, scientists announced that ancient human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. This discovery pushed the known date of human presence in North America back by thousands of years and implied that early inhabitants and megafauna co-existed for several millennia before the terminal Pleistocene extinction event. In a follow-up study, researchers used two new independent approaches to date the footprints, both of which resulted in the same age range as the original estimate.
The 2021 results began a global conversation that sparked public imagination and incited dissenting commentary throughout the scientific community as to the accuracy of the ages.
"Even as the original work was being published, we were forging ahead to test our results with multiple lines of evidence," said Kathleen Springer, USGS research geologist and co-lead author on the currentpaper."We were confident in our original ages, as well as the strong geologic, hydrologic, and stratigraphic evidence, but we knew that independent chronologic control was critical.
In addition to the pollen samples, the team used a different type of dating called optically stimulated luminescence, which dates the last time quartz grains were exposed to sunlight. Using this method, they found that quartz samples collected within the footprint-bearing layers had a minimum age of ~21,500 years, providing further support to the radiocarbon results.
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Do the ancient human footprints at White Sands date back to the last ice age?Jocelyn Solis-Moreira (she/her) is a science contributor at Popular Science. She covers a range of topics, including neuroscience, climate change, mental health, and infectious diseases. When Jocelyn’s done writing for the day, you’ll find her flying through the air in an aerial studio.
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