The finding is decisive for the debate on how homo sapiens came to America. (Photo: ScienceNews)
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23,000 year footprints, discovered in the southwestern United States, suggest that human settlements in North America are before the end of the ice age, which is supposed to have allowed this migration, according to a study published Thursday.
These tracks were left on the shore of a lake that is now dry and where there is now a desert in New Mexico, within the White Sands National Park, the AFP news agency reported.
Over time, sediments covered the tracks and protected them until erosion exposed them to the scientists’ approval.
“Many footprints appear to be teenagers and children. Larger adult footprints are less frequent,” the authors wrote in the study published in the US journal. Science.
Traces of prehistoric animals, mammoths and wolves were also identified. Some, like those of giant sloths, are even contemporary and close to those of humans on the shore of the lake.
The finding is decisive for the debate on how Homo sapiens came to America, the last continent populated by the species, since the footprints of White Sands “indicate that humans were present in the landscape at least 23,000 years ago, with an occupancy record of approximately two millennia, “the study stressed.
For decades, the most widely accepted thesis says that a settlement from Siberia crossed a land bridge – the current Bering Strait – to reach Alaska and expand south, adds AFP.
Archaeological evidence, including spearheads used to kill mammoths, has long suggested a 13,500-year-old settlement associated with the so-called Clovis culture, named after a city in New Mexico, considered the oldest American culture. , from where the ancestors of the Amerindians descend.
This model of the “primitive Clovis culture” has been questioned for 20 years by new discoveries that have pushed back the age of the first populations. However, in general, this date was not more than 16,000 years ago, after the end of “the last ice age.”
This episode of glaciation is crucial, because it is commonly accepted that the polar caps covering most of the northern part of the continent at this time made it impossible, or at any rate very difficult, any human migration from Asia, through the Bering Strait or through the Bering Strait. , as recent discoveries suggest, along the Pacific coast, concludes AFP.
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