A new study suggests humans arrived in the Americas before the height of the last ice age more than 20,000 years ago
Fossilized human footprints found in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park were almost certainly made more than 20,000 years ago, during the height of the last ice age, according to new research. The study, published on Thursday in Science, overthrows decades of thinking about when humans arrived in North America.
The White Sands footprints, however, suggest humans had already lived in New Mexico for thousands of years by the time the Clovis culture began. In the new study, the researchers determined the radiocarbon age of microscopic pollen grains in the sediment layers, which hadn’t grown in the lake water. They also found the pollen came from plants that no longer grow in the area. “There’s pollen from pine and spruce and fir, which grow at much higher elevations today,” Springer says. “So the flora indicates that ecosystem extended down to the valley floor 20,000 years ago.
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