The oldest known human footprints in the Americas have been uncovered at an ancient lakebed in what is today White Sands National Park in New Mexico . Dating to between 23,000 and 21,000 year onetime , the footprints agitate up many of the wide established theories about how and when humans first make it on the continent .
The tracks were first spot by David Bustos from the White Sands National Park , who had come across many of these tracks while move across the White Sands area . astonish by his find , he ask for a team of scientists to scrutinise the footprints in January 2016 , marking the beginning of the current excavation plan . Today , a transnational team fromBournemouth University in the UK , the University of Arizona , the US Geological Survey , and the National Park Service have published the analysis of this groundbreaking discovery in the journalScience .
finally , the squad sustain that the supporting players of mark had been created by humans , include children and adolescent , as well as mammoths and a heel - similar carnivore . Most spectacularly of all , an analytic thinking of the surrounding deposit bed reveal that the human course were imprinted into the ground sometime between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago .
“ These are the oldest known , well - date , footprint in the Americas,”Dr Sally Reynolds , co - writer and mammalian paleontologist from Bournemouth University , told IFLScience .
The tarradiddle of how and when multitude first come in the Americas is still hotly debated . Until late , the most widely go for scene was that the early inhabitants in the Americas were a mathematical group known as the " Clovis culture ” who determine in the continent around 15,000 to 13,000 years ago .
More recent discoveries have pushed this timescale back , with estimation for the reaching of these first occupantsranging from25,000 year agoto even33,000 years ago . However , concrete grounds is lacking . These recently discovered footprint confidently indicate that humans were stomping around the Americas 21,000 years ago , at the very least .
Tools and ivory can migrate to different sediment layers , which are used to help go steady them . “ footprint are very fragile within a sediment and can not migrate down , as a tool or off-white might do under certain circumstance , " explicate Dr Reynolds . " The number of footmark and their clear shape intend that they are unmistakably homo . ”
This could have some huge implications for our savvy of prehistoric human migration . Most researchers consider that thefirst humans in the Americasarrived from Asia across the Bering land bridge deck , which had formed between northeasterly Siberia and western Alaska . They then travel southwards through an inland water ice - free corridor in western Canada and/or via a Pacific coastal itinerary .
However , around 23,000 twelvemonth ago , this part of the world was grapple in the last Ice Age , aka the Last Glacial Maximum ( LGM ) . It was antecedently assumed that this migration through America would have been too tricky to pass over during the LGM . These bold footprints clearly say otherwise . However , it remains unsettled how exactly humans managed to make this unreliable journeying .
“ In the light of the determination , this means the early migration would have come via Asia , over the Bering Land Bridge , and into Alaska . We antecedently think that they would move south after around 16,000 [ year ago ] when the Ice sheet melted and a migration corridor opened , but the earlier date from White Sands shows that human beings were already in the Americas , " said Reynolds . " This means that humanity migrate into the Americas much earlier , but still via the same route . ”
