23,000-year-old footprints rewrite human history in America

The many traces look like the feet of teenagers or children

23,000-year-old footprints have been discovered in the southwestern United States, and a recent study suggests that human settlement of North America began long before the end of the Ice Age.

These footprints were then left in the mud at the bank of a river that is now parched and replaced by a white gypsum desert in White Sands National Park in the state of New Mexico.

With the passage of time, the sediments blocked these effects and intensified, which provided protection for them until erosion factors once again revealed these evidence of the past, which sparked enthusiasm among scientists.

The authors of the study, the results of which were published in the scientific journal "Science", wrote that "many footprints appear to be adolescents or children, and there are not many large footprints of adults."

Prehistoric traces of animals, including mammoths and wolves, were also identified.

Some of these monuments, such as those of giant sloths, are contemporary and similar to human footprints on the shores of the lake.

The discovery is of crucial importance in the raging debate over the origin of the arrival of Homo sapiens on the American continent, the last continent to be colonized by humankind.

This is due to the fact that the dating of the White Sands monuments indicates that people were present at the site at least 23,000 years ago.

For decades, the most plausible theory was of human settlement originating in eastern Siberia in which our ancestors crossed a land bridge (present-day Bering Strait), to Alaska and then extended south.

Archaeological evidence, including spears that were used to kill mammoths, has long led to the belief that there was a 13,500-year-old human settlement linked to a civilization called Clovis, after a city in New Mexico considered to be the first American culture from which the ancestors of Native Americans descended.

But the model of the "Primitive Clovis culture" has been in question for two decades, with new discoveries re-defining the date of the arrival of the first settlers.

But this date generally did not go beyond 16,000 years after the end of the "last glacial peak".

This glacial stage is of great importance, as it is known that the ice cover present at that time on the vast majority of the North American continent made it impossible, or extremely difficult, to record any human migration from Asia through the Bering Strait or from the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, as indicated by recent discoveries. .

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