Skeptics said footprints couldn’t be 23,000 years old. Bay Area scientists proved they were.
This undated photo made available by the National Park Service in September 2021 shows fossilized human footprints at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. A team of Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientists measured the carbon inside ancient tree pollen trapped inside layers of sand to estimate that the human footprints found there are 21,000 to 23,000 years old.
Today, White Sands National Park is a desert, with no native trees, only shrubs. Summer temperatures can soar to 110°F and bright white sand ripples for miles. Nearby is White Sands Missile Range, the U.S. Army’s largest land-based open-air testing site. Other tracks offer possible evidence of hunting. There are human footprints directly inside the tracks of a giant ground sloth. On the side is a second set of footprints, on tiptoe, suggesting that someone else tried to sneak up on the prey.
“The very important question was: When were these people and animals walking around together?” she said. The team painstakingly separated the 75,000 pollen grains from the sand. Then they purified them, cell by cell, using the Flow Cytometry Core Facility at Indiana University.
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