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About 23,000 years ago, a group of children and teenagers left footprints along Lake Otero in what is now southern New Mexico – perhaps they were fetching water for adults hunting a mammoth or the massive ground sloth that roamed the area in those days. This week, a team of researchers from White Sands National Park, the National Parks Service and others published an article in the journal Science, which concludes that those children’s footprints were the oldest known human tracks ever found in North America. Imprints of the tiny toes were found along outcrops of the since-dried-up lake, which...

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. Ancient human footprints preserved in the ground across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are astonishingly old, scientists reported on Thursday, dating back about 23,000 years to the Ice Age.The results, if they hold up to scrutiny, would rejuvenate the scientific debate about how humans first spread across the Americas, implying that they did so at a time when massive glaciers covered much of their path.Researchers who have argued for such...

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate....some of these prints could be tens of thousands of years old, making them potentially the best evidence yet that people reached the Americas far earlier than once believed. Radiocarbon dating of seeds surrounding the prints suggests that they were made during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets are thought to have blocked any passage from the Bering Land...

The footprints at White Sands were dated by examining the seeds of an aquatic plant that once thrived along the shores of the dried-up lake, Ruppia cirrhosa, commonly known as ditchgrass. According to research published Thursday in the journal Science and co-authored by Bustos, the ancient ditchgrass seeds were found in layers of hard earth both above and below the many human footprints at the site, and they were radiocarbon-dated to determine their age. The tracks at one location have been revealed as both the earliest known footprints and the oldest firm evidence of humans anywhere in the Americas, showing...

In January 2020, Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, both research geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey, went to New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin at White Sands National Park to see about some footprints. These weren’t just any footprints; the fossilized tracks represent the oldest human footprints in North America. What’s more, Tularosa Basin, about 20,000 years ago, was in the midst of what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). During this chilly, final part of the Pleistocene Era, the global sea level was about 400 feet lower and glaciers covered 25 percent of Earth’s land. Their mission was to find...

...In 2012, O’Grady’s team found camel teeth fragments under a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of Mount St. Helens that was dated over 15,000 years ago. The team also uncovered two finely crafted orange agate scrapers, one in 2012 with preserved bison blood residue and another in 2015, buried deeper in the ash. Natural layering of the rockshelter sediments suggests the scrapers are older than both the volcanic ash and camel teeth.Radiocarbon-dating analysis on the tooth enamel... yielded exciting results: a date of 18,250 years before present (14,900 radiocarbon years).That date, in association with stone tools, suggests that...

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths...Scientists analyzed...pendants made of bony material from the sloths...Dating of the ornaments and sediment at the Brazil site where they were found point to an age of 25,000 to 27,000 years ago...

A new study indicates that one of the largest of the Indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará.There are around fifty languages in the Tupí-Guaraní language family, which gave us words like "jaguar" and "piranha." Now, Dr. Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi from the University of Tübingen's Institute of Linguistics and a team of international researchers have used methods developed in the field of molecular biology to compare and investigate the Tupí-Guaraní languages. This has...

The first people to enter the Americas may have taken the coastal route along the Bering Strait Land Bridge during these two periods.During the last ice age, the coastal route from Asia to North America was so treacherous, humans likely crossed over only during two time windows, when environmental factors were more favorable for the long and dangerous journey, a new study finds.The first window lasted from 24,500 to 22,000 years ago, and the other spanned from 16,400 to 14,800 years ago, according to the study, published Feb. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(opens in...

...The new research was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday, August 17, wherein researchers found evidence of human Y chromosome sequences from an unidentified group in South America.The findings reportedly bring promising results that can potentially solve the mystery behind the missing genetic link of the human migration into South America.In recent years, multiple studies have continued to conduct the genetic mapping of human migration since our ancient ancestors left the continent of Africa around 60,000 years ago. From there, our predecessors expanded their presence and settlements across the six continents of the world...Amongst these research, three studies...

An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said...Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Prior work regarding the...

An unexpected discovery by an Iowa State University researcher suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago – nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought. Andrew Somerville, an assistant professor of anthropology in world languages and cultures, says he and his colleagues made the discovery while studying the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. As part of that work, they wanted to establish a date for the earliest human occupation of the Coxcatlan Cave in the valley, so they obtained radiocarbon dates for several rabbit and deer bones that...

Tools excavated from a cave in central Mexico are strong evidence that humans were living in North America at least 30,000 years ago, some 15,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday.​ Artefacts, including 1,900 stone tools, showed human occupation of the high-altitude Chiquihuite Cave over a roughly 20,000 year period, they reported in two studies, published in Nature. "Our results provide new evidence for the antiquity of humans in the Americas," Ciprian Ardelean, an archeologist at the Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas and lead author of one of the studies, told AFP. "There are only a few artefacts and...

Archaeologists in Mexico found stone tools and other signs that people were living in North America 30,000 years ago, much earlier than widely believed, according to new research reshaping the debate over the origins of people in the Americas.In a study reported Wednesday, scientists led by archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean at Mexico’s University of Zacatecas said that they had unearthed hundreds of unusual green limestone spear points, blades and other implements from a lofty cavern in the central Mexican highlands. For wandering hunter-gatherers, the cave served as a makeshift tool shed possibly beginning as early as about 33,000 years ago, the...

Full title: Four ancient skulls unearthed in Mexico suggest that North America was a melting pot of different peoples and cultures 10,000 years ago The first humans to settle in North America were more diverse than previously believed, according to a new study of skeletal fragments. US scientists analysed four skulls recovered from caves in Mexico that belonged to humans that lived sometime between 9,000 to 13,000 years ago. The researchers were surprised to find a high level of diversity, with the skulls ranging in similarity to that of Europeans, Asian and ...

U.S. anthropologists hypothesize that ancestors of aboriginal people in South and North America followed High Arctic route Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed. The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Stone tools and other artifacts unearthed from an archaeological dig at the Cooper’s Ferry site in western Idaho suggest that people lived in the area 16,000 years ago, more than a thousand years earlier than scientists previously thought. The artifacts would be considered among the earliest evidence of people in North America. The findings, published today in Science, add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pacific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor, said Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and...

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Anthony Watts WUWT readers may recall this recent story: New evidence of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact The story below provides much more detail about the Younger Dryas event and the split that has developed in the scientific community over the cause. I’ve added this graph below from NCDC to give readers a sense of time and magnitude of the event. – Anthony The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. From:Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 19, Issues 1-5, 1 January 2000, Richard B. AlleyGuest Post By: Rodney Chilton www.bcclimate.com A consideration of many...

Americas Settled 15,000 Years Ago, Study Says Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic NewsMarch 13, 2008 A consensus is emerging in the highly contentious debate over the colonization of the Americas, according to a study that says the bulk of the region wasn't settled until as late as 15,000 years ago. Researchers analyzed both archaeological and genetic evidence from several dozen sites throughout the Americas and eastern Asia for the paper. "In the past archaeologists haven't paid too much attention to molecular genetic evidence," said lead author Ted Goebel, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "We have brought...

Penon WomanPenon WomanScientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it...