Happy Indigenous People’s Day in the United States! And what could be more appropriate to acknowledge the holiday than the study published just this month in _Science_ that confirmed the dating of these fossilized footprints — the oldest we have of Homo sapiens on North American ground? Using two new different dating methods, geologists Jeffrey Pigati, Kathleen Springer, and Matthew Bennett have persuasively argued that they date between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago — when this continent was still in an ice age and giant sloths wandered around.
The footprints lie in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, and in 2021 Springer and Pigati had used carbon dating from seeds from Ruppia cirrhosis, an aquatic plant which hasn’t always produced the most reliable results. So in this new paper, they also use a dating method of quartz and feldspar particles in the footprints that can test for how long the particles have been buried away from the sun, along with carbon dating of some conifer grains. All three methods support a dating between 23,000-21,000 years.
This evidence is another nail in the coffin for the “Clovis people” hypothesis, which only a few decades ago argued that the first Americans were living here no more than 16,000-13,000 years ago.
The footprints lie in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, and in 2021 Springer and Pigati had used carbon dating from seeds from Ruppia cirrhosis, an aquatic plant which hasn’t always produced the most reliable results. So in this new paper, they also use a dating method of quartz and feldspar particles in the footprints that can test for how long the particles have been buried away from the sun, along with carbon dating of some conifer grains. All three methods support a dating between 23,000-21,000 years.
This evidence is another nail in the coffin for the “Clovis people” hypothesis, which only a few decades ago argued that the first Americans were living here no more than 16,000-13,000 years ago.
Sources:
_Science_ 5 Oct, 2023, vol 382 issue 6666, pages 73-75, “Independent age estimates solve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands,” Kathleen Springer, Jeffrey Pigati, and Matthew Bennett. _LiveScience_ “Debate settled? Oldest human footprints in North America really are 23,000 years old, study finds,” Laura Geggel, Oct 2023
