Posted on 10/05/2023 5:43:13 PM PDT by gnarledmaw
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 out just how old these footprints were using different dating techniques of biological markers around them.
They were able to complete one method before the pandemic hit. They’d used radiocarbon dating on fossilized impressions of Ruppia cirrhosa seeds, a type of aquatic ditch grass. These seeds had been in the same stratigraphic layer as the footprints, placing them in the same time period.
Then the pandemic rolled in. They couldn’t return to the Basin to collect samples for the other analyses. They went ahead with publishing their results from the Ruppia seeds in a 2021 paper in the journal Science, concluding that the seeds were between 21 and 23,000 years old; therefore, so were the footprints. Not only does this conclusion put an age to footprint fossils, but it alters the suggested timeline of when humans came to North America. According to the paper, if these footprints were 23,000 years old, then humans had entered North America before the LGM ice sheets formed, challenging the notion that humans have only been on the continent for about 15,000 years.
This paper raised controversy, even drawing a comment also published in Science four months later, noting that Ruppia seed fossils aren’t reliable age markers through radiocarbon dating, which analyzes how much the isotope carbon-14 has decayed in organic matter. Aquatic plants can absorb dissolved carbon from the water, which could inflate their radiocarbon-dated age by thousands of years.
Pigati and Springer knew this, which is why their plan all along had been to include two other dating methods. “We knew even at that point that dating aquatic material could be potentially problematic,” Pigati told Inverse. So, they planned to bolster their analysis with dating techniques on two other, distinct specimens. In January 2022, they finished the work they’d set out to do. Today, they publish another paper in Science, showing the analyses they’d intended to do since 2020. This evidence, too, shows that the footprints are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old.
“The bottom line is that people were in what is now southern New Mexico 23,000 years ago,” Springer tells Inverse. “These people had to have been here before the ice sheets closed.”
The new evidence comes from fossilized pollen and some quartz. The pollen skirts the carbon-absorption issue from Ruppia because it comes from terrestrial trees, and can’t suck up dissolved carbon. Radiocarbon dating of pollen seeds from the same layer of earth as the footprints rendered that they, too, were 21 to 23,000 years old. What’s more, these pollen came from conifers, which thrive in colder climes. While there aren’t any conifers where the Tularosa Basin is now, it would’ve been cold enough tens of thousands of years ago.
As for the quartz, Pigati, Springer, and their team performed what’s called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). OSL is based on the buildup of luminescence, or light, properties in quartz crystals. It’s possible to actually see how long it’s been since the crystals last saw sunlight. This, too, corroborated the 21 to 23,000 hypothesis.
“That means that there was enough of a population that sustained itself for people to visit this lake edge over and over and over again and leave their thousands of footprints during that period of time,” Springer says. “So what it does establish is: People were here.”
Another U.S.G.S. research geologist, published a paper this past February in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ways that people reached North America to create this population Springer describes. This further research questions how ancient peoples came to current North America via a coastal route when interior continental paths were blocked with ice sheets.
As for Springer and Pigati, they’ll continue dating White Sands and its surrounding area. “Our focus is on White Sands and telling the story of the context of the footprints,” Springer says.
Ping )))))
Give the land back!
But were they what we might call Giants ?
Great.
Hit the Indians for reparations.
“Then the pandemic rolled in. They couldn’t return to the Basin to collect samples for the other analyses.”
WTF?
Either BS or they are wussies.
They started global warming with their Flintstones SUV’s and it continues to get hot ever since. 🤣🤣🤣
“Hit the Indians for reparations.”
They were not displaced by the Indians, they were the forefathers of the Indians.
Incredible how you could even come up with that misconception...
Not sure how this fits with everything else. But there is a lot of evidence that there were at least three large waves of people as much as 5000 years apart that came down into South America and overtook the people already living there to some extent. So the indians in North America now are not the original inhabitants. They were only the last inhabitants. Also the indians in different parts of North America and South and Central America were very different in culture, language and looks. So their claim to America is quite naive. Yes they were here. But they were neither the first nor the only ones. Some were quite aggressive. And others quite docile. Incas were quite advanced while others were nomads.
I always thought the idea that humans did not arrive in the Americas until after the last ice age was laughable. Less than 15,000 years and they settled the Americas from Alaska/Northern Canada to the tip of South America? No way.
Nonsense. Recorded history is only six to seven thousand years. Where were these people before that? Extrapolate further to evolutionary postulates that man has been around for at least three million years and we have a problem. What were all these supposed humans doing during that time?
Yet we have a six thousand year history from supposedly living in “caves” to making computers. Where all all the bodies? Millions of years and they could not figure out how to get out of a cave and build a house? Nonsense.
A better question is what wiped out the first people here.
How do you know they weren’t killed by Indians?
Why not?
Lots of food, and almost no disease. Nothing to do but hunt lots of stupid big game and make babies.
Starting with just 20 people, you populate both continents in a thousand years.
You are using common sense and logic. Great questions.
A bigger problem is the oldest stuff is in South America, like at Monte Verde.
“How do you know they weren’t killed by Indians?”
Hand slaps forehead... lol
The Indians did not come after these people, They are not two different people, these are the same Indians who actually came sooner than thought. Before them there was no one.
Lol...
Because everybody knows this place was a paradise before the evil white man came. Everyone lived in peace and harmony here. Everyone shared. They played games and were happy. Don’t believe the things historians tell you about tribes warring against one another, human sacrifices and such as that. It was paradise until Lewis and Clark drove their SUVs to the Pacific Northwest spreading diseases and leaving behind those plastic clamshell things that Big Macs come in and soda straws and plastic cups along the trail.
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