ABOVE: Prints at the base of the excavation trench
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, USGS, AND BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
On the right day, given the proper conditions, human footprints can appear out of nowhere on the flats of White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Park scientists call them “ghost tracks,” and they look like prints from a beachgoer striding across damp sand. But new research published today in Science reports that at least some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land Bridge into southern North America.
“It’s startling, really,” says Stuart Fiedel, an independent research archaeologist not affiliated with the ...
