New footprint dates bolster claim that humans lived in Americas during Ice Age

Two years ago, a team of scientists published a finding that rocked the world of archaeology: Human footprints found in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park were between 23,000 and 21,000 years old. That was during the height of the Last Ice Age and at least 5000 years before most archaeologists thought people arrived in the Americas. The paper drew praise but also skepticism, particularly around its radiocarbon dating method. Now, the White Sands team says new work with two additional dating techniques confirms the great antiquity of the footprints. If they’re right, “it resets the playing field of what’s possible” in terms of how archaeologists understand the peopling of the Americas, says Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University. Archaeologists will have to reconsider the routes people may have taken into the continent and where to look for traces of its earliest inhabitants. But Davis and other skeptics still want more evidence for this extraordinary claim. When the footprints were made, a lake existed in what is now the desert of White Sands. People and animals walking along the water’s edge imprinted thousands of tracks in the mud, and over time those prints were buried, but not erased. In the team’s first paper , the researchers radiocarbon dated seeds from a grassy aquatic plant called Ruppia cirrhosa , which were embedded in layers of earth between the footprints. But since R. cirrhosa ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news