from the whose-footprints-are-these? dept.
Fossilized footprints show humans made it to North America much earlier than first thought:
North and South America were the last continents to be settled by humans, but exactly when that started is a topic that has divided archaeologists.
The commonly held view is that people arrived in North America from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge that once connected the two continents, at the end of the Ice Age around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. But more recent -- and some contested -- discoveries have suggested humans might have been in North America earlier.
Now, researchers studying fossilized human footprints in New Mexico say they have the first unequivocal evidence that humans were in North America at least 23,000 years ago.
"The peopling of the Americas is one of those things that has been for many years very contentious and a lot of archeologists hold views with almost religious zeal," said Matthew Bennett, a professor and specialist in ancient footprints at Bournemouth University and author of a study on the new findings that published in the journal Science on Thursday.
"One of the problems is that there is very few data points," he added.
Bennett and his colleagues were able to accurately date 61 footprints by radiocarbon dating layers of aquatic plant seeds that had been preserved above and below them. The prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin in White Sands National Park, were made 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, the researchers found.
Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, et al. Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum[$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586)
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The age claim of the preserved footprints found in New Mexico's Lake Otero Basin are brought into question:
The wide expanse of an ancient lakebed in New Mexico holds the preserved footprints of life that roamed millennia ago. Giant sloths and mammoths left their mark, and alongside them, signs of our human ancestors. Research published in September 2021 claimed that these footprints are "definitive evidence of human occupation of North America" during the last ice age, dating back to between 23 and 21 thousand years ago. Now, a new study disputes the evidence of such an early age.
[...] At the center of the debate are the tiny seeds of an aquatic plant used to age the footprints. The timeframe for the seeds was identified using radiocarbon dating methods, in which researchers examine a type of carbon known as Carbon-14. Carbon-14 originates in the atmosphere and is absorbed by plants through photosynthesis. [...] But the plant species used, Ruppia cirrhosa, grows underwater and therefore obtains much of its carbon for photosynthesis not directly from the atmosphere as terrestrial plants do, but from dissolved carbon atoms in the water.
"While the researchers recognize the problem, they underestimate the basic biology of the plant," says Rhode. "For the most part, it's using the carbon it finds in the lake waters. And in most cases, that means it's taking in carbon from sources other than the contemporary atmosphere – sources which are usually pretty old."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @06:03PM (2 children)
Here's my footprint 8-----D
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday September 25 2021, @08:27PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @09:03PM
Parent AC's are sub-pixel size so they don't show up due to quantization rounding down.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 25 2021, @06:42PM (1 child)
The first thought arrived in North America later than the first humans? Seems the first North Americans were thoughtless! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @08:30PM
So now we know where conservatives came from...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @07:31PM (3 children)
Now the Indians have stop complaining about how we stole their land from them, since they stole it from Mr Footprint.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @08:07PM (2 children)
And now the
Irish Italians Mexicans MuslimsLGBTQers are taking it from us.(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @10:22PM (1 child)
No zhe isn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26 2021, @03:48AM
Give it time and Zhe Jinping will own everything in the universe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @08:09PM (2 children)
There's a whole continent under the antarctic ice cap. THAT is the last coninent to be "sort of settled by humans." But not like there are any multi-generation families spending their whole lifetimes living there, so it's still not been settled. Except by penguins …
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @11:03PM
Antarctica was settled 12k years ago. The ruins are hidden under the ice.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 26 2021, @03:54AM
Linux pioneers??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @08:22PM
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @10:08PM
Reminder that anyone not descended from the original immigrants to these continents are COLONIZERS and need to pay REPARATIONS or LEAVE.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @10:30PM (2 children)
Why do the researchers assume it was a man? It could have been a woman or even a binary-confused caveperson.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @10:36PM (1 child)
Why assume it was a human at all? Could have been a saber-toothed Muslim looking for somewhere to conquer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26 2021, @03:44AM
Or a 700-pound saber-toothed incel looking for more junk food to bring back to his mom's basement.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 26 2021, @12:22AM
A lot of "early" evidence of humans in the Americas is located relatively close to a seacoast. Such evidence might be explained away as seafarers being shipwrecked or whatever. White Sands is quite a long way from any sea, or the Gulf of Mexico. It was even further 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, when a lot more water was tied up in glaciers. A presence in White Sands suggests that these weren't just a small band of transients, but they were pretty well established on the continent.
(Score: 1) by HammeredGlass on Sunday September 26 2021, @01:35PM
"The science is settled"
same people