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MEXICO CITY - A trail of 13 fossilized footprints running through a valley in a desert in northern Mexico could be among the oldest in the Americas, Mexican archeologists said. The footprints were made by hunter gatherers who are believed to have lived thousands of years ago in the Coahuila valley of Cuatro Cienegas, 190 miles (306 kms) south of Eagle Pass, Texas, said archaeologist Yuri de la Rosa Gutierrez of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. "We believe (the footprints) are between 10,000 and 15,000 years old," De la Rosa said in a news release Wednesday. "We have...

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...

Footprints in the ash By Sid PerkinsMay 29th, 2008Humans may have been walking around what is now central Mexico 40,000 years ago HUMAN PRINTSFootprints (one left) left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years could be evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer than previously confirmed. Laser scans of the prints (right) confirm their human origins, the researchers report today at the American Geophysical Union meeting. Footprints left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years ago are evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer...

Cloud of scholarly dust rises over ancient footprints claim Tuesday, April 25, 2006 BRADLEY T. LEPPER Are the footprints of surprisingly ancient Americans preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash in southern Mexico? In December, an article in the journal Science cast a cloud of doubt over that claim. The authors, Michael Waters and Paul Renne, argue that the ash dated to 1.3 million years ago, much too old for humans on this continent, and that the so-called footprints were nothing more than marks made by the tools of modern workers quarrying the stone with crowbars. Now, Silvia Gonzalez, an archaeologist from...

'Footprints' debate to run and run By Martin Redfern BBC radio science unit The markings in the quarry were first identified in 2003 It was a sensational discovery - human footprints said to be 40,000 years old, preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico. The announcement, in July last year, created a flurry of excitement, but was then promptly dismissed by a second team of researchers who re-dated the rocks at 1.3 million years old, impossibly ancient to bear human traces. The original claim has not gone away, however. The first widespread evidence for the human occupation...

Contact: Robert Sanders rsanders@berkeley.edu 510-643-6998 University of California - Berkeley Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought Berkeley -- Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the...

A plastic replica of a 40,000-year-old, size eight foot has shattered previous theories of the identity of the first humans to walk in the Americas. Scientists made the foot from tracks left on the shore of an ancient volcanic lake in central Mexico. The traditional view is that the first settlers walked across the Bering Strait, from Russia to Alaska, at the end of the last ice age around 11,500 to 11,000 years ago. But the discovery of footprints in the Valsequillo Basin by a British-led team provides new evidence that humans settled in the Americas as early as 40,000...