23,000-year-old footprints have been found in the United States, suggesting that humans settled in North America long before the end of the last Ice Age, according to researchers.
Results announced Thursday delayed the date when the continent was colonized by its first inhabitants for thousands of years.
Footprints were left in the mud on the shores of the long-dry lake, which is now part of the New Mexico desert.
Sediments fill crevices and compact in rocks, protect evidence of our ancient relatives, and give scientists a detailed view of their lives.
The first footprints were found at the bottom of a dry lake in White Sands National Park in 2009. Scientists at the US Geological Survey recently analyzed the seeds attached to the footprints to determine their approximate age, which ranges from 22,800 to 21,130 years ago.
“Lots of trails seem to be for teens and children; “Larger adult footprints are less frequent,” wrote the authors of the study published in the American journal Science.
One hypothesis for this is division of labor, in which adults engage in skill-requiring tasks while ‘pick up and carry’ are delegated to adolescents.
“Children accompany teenagers, and collectively they leave more footprints.”
The researchers also found footprints left by mammoths, prehistoric wolves, and even giant sloths, which appear to have occurred at the same time that humans visited the lake.
Historical discovery
The Americas were the last continent that mankind had reached.
For decades, the most popular theory was that settlers came to North America from eastern Siberia via a land bridge – the present-day Bering Strait.
From Alaska, head south for a much more pleasant atmosphere.
Archaeological evidence, including spearheads used to kill mammoths, has long suggested a 13,500-year-old settlement linked to the so-called Clovis culture — named after a town in New Mexico.
It is considered the first civilization on the continent, and a precursor to the groups that came to be known as the Native Americans.
However, the notion of the Clovis culture has been challenged over the past 20 years, with new discoveries that bring back the era of the first settlements.
In general, even the delayed estimate of the age of these first settlements is no more than 16,000 years, after the end of the so-called “last glacier maximum” – the period when the ice sheet spread the most.
This episode, which lasted until about 20,000 years ago, was significant because it was believed that with ice covering much of the northern part of the continent, human migration from Asia to North America and beyond would be extremely difficult.
–
