These two human prints, originally discovered in 1961, have been dated to be about 10,550 years old. (Photo courtesy Arturo Gonzalez)
Posted on 12/13/2013 8:22:19 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A hunter-gatherer who trekked through a desert oasis a hundred centuries ago left the continent’s most lasting impression: the oldest known human footprints in North America.
There are only two of them — one left and one right — but the ancient traveler’s path through mineral-rich sediment in the Chihuahuan Desert allowed them to become enshrined in stone, and now dated, some 10,500 years later...
The tracks were first discovered during highway construction in northeastern Mexico, about 300 kilometers from the Texas border, in 1961. They were excavated and taken to a local museum for study, but their precise location was lost to history.
A search for the site in 2006 came up empty, but it did turn up an additional 11 tracks in the general area where the original prints were believed to have been found — a marshy, spring-fed desert refuge known as Cuatro Ciénegas.
“Both sets of prints are ones that have been identified before and are the only reported footprints in the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin, but neither have previously been dated,” Felstead said in an interview.
Felstead and his team were able to date the tracks because they were preserved in travertine, a sedimentary rock that contains minute traces of uranium from the waters in which it formed.
Since uranium decays into the element thorium at predictable rates, the scientists were able to measure the ratio of those materials to determine the specimens’ ages.
Their results showed that the pair of tracks discovered in 1961, now housed at Saltillo’s Museo del Desierto, were about 10,550 years old.
The 11 other prints, which remain where they were found in a Cuatro Ciénegas quarry, dated back about 7,250 years,
(Excerpt) Read more at westerndigs.org ...
These two human prints, originally discovered in 1961, have been dated to be about 10,550 years old. (Photo courtesy Arturo Gonzalez)
Or Maybe....
The bones found had skulls that were oval. That meant that European/Caucasian types were here LONG before any Siberian hunter groups...read that as “Indians.” Asians have ROUND heads; Europeans have oval ones.
Hahaha, good pic.
Were they headed north?
lousy arches
Wearing adidas I’m sure.
I had a Saltillo tile floor in my house when I lived in TX 35 years ago. It had Mexican footprint in it too!
More illegals crossing the Texas border!!! Started earlier than I thought.
Beat me. I was going to muse, “which way were they headed?”
Always thought there would be four..
Two on tiptoes and two sprinting away..
How would those Europeans have gotten across, do you think?
How would those Europeans have gotten across, do you think?
Mass transportation, of course. That's the answer to everything, isn't it?
By the way, everyone, Sunday is Double Double Dessert Dessert Day Day. Do your part!
Those are my footprints when I was a wee lad.
why would they have to 'get across'?
The continents were once joined, for one thing.
For another, why is it always assumed that because, for tens of thousands of years no one in Europe knew there WAS a north and south America - ergo, no other people - that, after discovery, any people here had to've come from the old world.
Why?
Why couldn't there have been people on these continents from the beginning also?
man is arrogant.
65 million years ago.
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