Evidence indicates fossil footprints in New Mexico are oldest sign of humans in Americas

New research shows that fossilized footprints near an ancient lakebed in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park are as old as 21,000 to 23,000 years old, Associated Press wrote of a recent study.

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The new evidence puts humans in the Americas thousands of years before scientists thought, making the footprints likely the oldest in the Americas, USGS.com reported. It also indicates that humans for a few millennia existed alongside the North American megafauna, such as giant sloths, the dire wolf, beavers as big as bears, and wild pigs larger than a modern rhino, Treehugger.com reported.

It lends credence to the idea that megafauna quickly disappeared from the Americas biosphere after being hunted intensely by humans.

The footprints were originally found and dated in 2021, but there was disagreement in the scientific community that called the age into question, AP reported. Some believed the radiocarbon dating was inaccurate because the aquatic plants used for dating could have absorbed dissolved carbon from the water in the lake rather than in the surrounding air, which would skew the numbers, USGA wrote.

The new study employed a different methodology, dating land plants instead of water plants. Radiocarbon dating for conifer pollen that was found in the same layers of rock as the original seeds from the same land plants. The pollen was “statistically identical to the corresponding seed age,” USGA said of the study.