Some fingerprints indicate America was populated earlier than expected

The discovery of some footprints 23,000-year-old humans in the southwestern United States suggest that the North American colonies predate the end of the Ice Age, refuting the current hypothesis of crossing the Bering Strait.

The traces found were left on the shore of a dry lake and where there is now a desert in New Mexico, in White Sands National Park. “They provide a portrait of what was going on: adolescents interacting with children and adults,” detailed lead author of the study, Matthew Bennett, of the University of Bournemouth in the UK. In addition, traces of prehistoric animals, mammoths and wolves have been identified. Some, like those of the giant sloths, are even contemporary with those of the humans.

The meeting is decisive for the debate on the arrival of Homo sapiens in America, the last populated continent of the species, since the prints of White Sands “indicate that Man was present in the landscape at least 23 years ago. 000 years old, with a record occupation of around two millennia, ”the study points out.

For decades, the most widely accepted thesis argues that a Siberian colony crossed a land bridge, the present-day Bering Strait, to reach Alaska and expand south. In turn, archaeological evidence, including spearheads used to kill mammoths, has long suggested a 13,500-year-old colony associated with the so-called culture Clovis, named after a town in New Mexico, considered the oldest American culture, from which the ancestors of Native Americans descend. This model of the “primitive Clovis culture” was challenged for 20 years by new discoveries which pushed back the age of the first populations. However, this date was no more than 16,000 years after the end of “the last ice age”.