Ancient Human Presence Revealed At White Sands National Park

Ancient Human Presence Revealed At White Sands National Park

Researchers Push Back Date Of Human Arrival In North America Thousands Of Years

By Kurt Repanshek

Humans arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than previously accepted, according to groundbreaking research tied to a series of human -- and animal -- footprints preserved in fossilized sand within today's White Sands National Park.

Three years after scientists revealed the existence of human footprints and those of a giant, razor-clawed ground sloth that led them to believe the humans were hunting the sloth, on Thursday the scientists announced in the journal Science that the tracks were laid down between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. At the time, the landscape contained a prehistoric lake, Palaeo-lake Otero, that ebbed in size with groundwater supplies and precipitation, according to the scientists. Most of the tracks were laid down on the eastern shores of this lake, they noted.

At the time, accoring to the National Park Service, the climate was wetter with much more vegetation than is seen today.

One could have seen grasslands stretching for miles that would have looked more like the prairies of Nebraska than New Mexico’s deserts.

This paradise of lush green life naturally captured the attention of the larger animals of the ice age. Plant eaters of all kinds came to Lake Otero to feast on the grasses and trees of the Tularosa Basin. Large plant-eaters attracted fearsome predators of the ice age, such as dire wolves and the American lion. Throughout the ice age, these animals left their footprints along the wetlands of Lake Otero.--National Park Service

It long has been generally accepted by the scientific community that humans were able to cross the Bering Land Bridge from Asia into North America between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago. The announcement Thursday pushes that date back by roughly 10,000 years.

Vince Santucci, the National Park Service's senior paleontologist, told the Traveler that the older date was determined from organic materials found alongside fossilized human and mammal tracks at White Sands.

"We have individual trackways that we that we're monitoring of humans, and trackways of sloths, that within the single trackways -- right foot, left foot, right foot -- that we have sloth tracks stepping on human footprints in one part of the trackway, and then humans stepping on sloth footprints in a single walkway. That's how we tied it into an absolute moment in time," said Santucci.

The trackways were revealed in a remote area of White Sands National Park, which is located in southern New Mexico. The researchers had obtained a permit from the National Park Service to dig a trench "well over a dozen meters in length, about two meters in depth, and we did it in a very highly concentrated part of the park that has lots of these footprints," said Santucci.

"What that did is it provided an insitu -- in place -- profile, where we found human and mammal footprints from the Pleistocene in at least seven, possibly eight, different horizons, stratigraphically imposed," he continued. "So that means there's a sequence over time. In there, we fortunately had a really good organic source of pollen and plant materials, seeds, that we did age dating. And the age dating lined up exactly where we thought it would go. The age of it was older than we ever anticipated."

The Park Service paleontologist acknowledged that the announcement likely would be "met with tremendous scrutiny and criticism."

"A lot of people are fearful to go back there," Santucci said. "If you read every textbook on archaeology published through today, they're going to talk about the antiquity of humans entering the new world around between 13 and 14,000 years ago, based on all of the archaeological data accepted by the community. That's what we're teaching our students. We're back older than that."

White Sands Superintendent Marie Sauter said "(t)hese incredible discoveries illustrate that White Sands National Park is not only a world-class destination for recreation but is also a wonderful scientific laboratory that has yielded groundbreaking, fundamental research.”

The trackways were initially found about a dozen years ago by David Bustos, the park's chief of resources. The tracks showed that someone followed a sloth, purposely stepping in its tracks as they did so, he said back in 2018. Team member Matthew Bennett, a professor of environmental and geographical sciences at Bournemouth University in England, at the time said the ancient humans appeared to be stalking the sloth.

“So we ask, why? Adolescent exuberance? Possible but unlikely,” Bennett said in 2018. “We see interesting circles of sloth tracks in these stalked trackways, which we call flailing circles. These record the rise of the sloth on its hind legs and the swing of its forelegs, presumably in a defensive motion.”

It's long been known that White Sands, which was designated a national monument on January 18, 1933, by President Hoover and redesignated in 2019 by Congress, contains the world’s largest gypsum dunefield as well as the globe’s largest collection of Ice-Age fossilized footprints. But Thursday's announcement tells a deeper, more profound story of humans in North America.

The delay between the 2018 announcement of the trackways' discovery and Thursday's announcement stemmed from the involvement of various specialists: "a multi-disciplinary team of specialists in geology, paleontology, archaeology, and other fields of study," said Santucci.

"The age dating of the Late Pleistocene playa deposits, which preserved the human and megafaunal foot prints, required consultation and collaboration with several specialists in geochronology and calibrated age dating," he explained. "Since the dating is one of the most important questions we hoped to address, we were rigorous in terms of these analyses to confidently present the findings."

The Park Service paleontologist added that not only has the dating of the trackways been "examined by the world's experts who do radio method dating," but the conclusions point to "a 2,000-year occupation by humans in this Mesopotamian of the New World."

"We've got people in this place, whether they left and then came back, or they stayed there as residents," Santucci said. "We've got a 2,000-year chronology that is unrefutable."