| By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY, September 27, 2021 |
Footprints preserved in the boundless expanses of New Mexico‘s White Sands National Park have drawn the attention of scientists since the early 1930s, when a government trapper spotted a print measuring a stunning 22 inches long and eight inches wide. He was convinced he‘d found evidence for the mythical Bigfoot. (Actually, it was a giant sloth.)
The latest footprint discovery at White Sands has also revealed startling evidence—but of a very different kind.
Researchers have dated sets of human footprints at White Sands (pictured above) to about 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, thousands and thousands of years before the earliest people in the Americas are believed to have migrated from Asia. This discovery appears to be more widely embraced by the scientific community than last year‘s claim for a human presence in Mexico some 30,000 years ago.
| These ephemeral appearances of the footprints at White Sands have earned the nickname “ghost tracks.” Each footprint marks the place where an ancient relative once stood thousands of years ago. (Above, an artistic rendering of what life on the shores of now-extinct Lake Otero may have looked like more than 20,000 years ago.) “[It] just gives us goosebumps,” Kim Charlie, a member of the Pueblo of Acoma, says of visiting the site. Many Native American tribes and pueblos feel a spiritual connection to White Sands, and Charlie is part of a committee in the Tribal Historic Preservation Office that has been collaborating with the research team to ensure the prints“ preservation. (Sources: National Geographic) |
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