Ancient Footprints Push Back Date of Human Arrival in the Americas

The New York Times ^ | 23 Sept 2021 | Carl Zimmer

[Theoria]

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 an early arrival hailed the new study as firm proof.

“I think this is probably the biggest discovery about the peopling of America in a hundred years,” said Ciprian Ardelean, an archaeologist at Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico who was not involved in the work. “I don’t know what gods they prayed to, but this is a dream find.”

For decades, many archaeologists have maintained that humans spread across North and South America only at the end of the last ice age. They pointed to the oldest known tools, including spear tips, scrapers and needles, dating back about 13,000 years. The technology was known as Clovis, named for the town of Clovis, N.M., where some of these first instruments came to light.

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The age of the Clovis tools lined up neatly with the retreat of the glaciers. That alignment bolstered a scenario in which Siberian hunter-gatherers moved into Alaska during the Ice Age, where they lived for generations until ice-free corridors opened and allowed them to expand southward.

[Texan5]

Being Hispanic/of Spanish ancestry-mostly Basque-this is particularly interesting-if any ancestor who came to the New
World spoke anything but ordinary Spanish, it is not known-but that was over 400 years ago-those people were just interested in getting to a place further away from the center of arbitrary power of the Crown and nobility-they didn’t leave info about much else...

[Texan5]

I’ve found a spear point with the top obviously broken, a couple of arrowheads and what looks like a knapped flint tool for pounding grain, etc-all were in/among the rocks of the riverbank after floods-everyone finds them out here near the river, especially where there are shallow caves in the cliffs above...

[Red Badger]

As a kid in north Mississippi I used to go into the freshly plowed fields near a creek after a spring rain and find arrowheads..................