The human being would have arrived in America 7 thousand years earlier than expected | Scientists have found traces of over 20,000 years ago

An investigation concluded that human beings populated America at least 7,000 years earlier than previously believed. The most accepted work to date has shown that the first settlers in North America inhabited the land 16,000 years ago. However, specialists who conducted an investigation in New Mexico found new traces of inhabitants dating back between 23,000 and 21,000 years.

Investigators found the fingerprints on the White Sands National Park. There, a team from the United States Geological Survey found the footprints, and in the layers of sediment above and below the footprints, seeds appeared which were tested for carbon 14. Thus, the age approximate footprints.

They are believed to have belonged to adolescents and children who left as migrants, usually in the company of an adult. One hypothesis suggests that they may have been helping in a hunt typical of some native cultures of the United States, in what is known as “buffalo leap” (it involved leading animals to the edge of a shallow cliff ).

The animals “had to be treated within a short period of time,” said Sally Reynolds, a researcher at the University of Bournemouth and co-author of the study. “We had to light a fire, we had to start burning the fat,” he added. The teens could have helped collect firewood, water or other resources.

Seniority discussion

With this discovery, the discussion of the arrival of the first human beings on the American continent could be settled. Fossils found to this day have always been the subject of controversy, as stone tools repeatedly found can be stones broken by a natural process. The oldest elements, among the supposed tools, tend to have less precise cuts than the spear points of 13,000 years ago, for example.

“One of the reasons there is so much debate is that there is a real lack of firm and unambiguous data. That’s what we probably think we have, ”Professor Matthew Bennett, lead author and researcher at Bournemouth University, told the BBC. “Footprints are not stone tools. A footprint is a footprint, and it cannot move up and down (in the layers of the ground), ”he added.

In the case of the footprints found, a probable “reservoir effect” had to be ruled out. This implies that carbon can sometimes be recycled in aqueous environments, interfering with radiocarbon dating results, making a site appear older than it actually is. This does not appear to have been the case in the New Mexico investigation.

“They performed dating checks on material near the prints and found that the all-terrestrial (charcoal) samples were of a similar age to the aquatic species closest to the prints,” dating expert Tom said. Higham at the University’s BBC Radiocarbon. from Vienna. He added that “they also argued, rightly, that the lake must have been shallow as people passed, mitigating the reservoir effect generated by ancient carbon sources”. Thus, this is how fingerprints can be dated between 21,000 and 23,000 years old.

Competing hypothesis

Over the past half century, a consensus has emerged among archaeologists in the United States that the Clovis culture was the first to reach America via a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska in the Bering Strait during the ice Age. . So, they stopped looking for signs that there were older settlers.

However, this theory began to be questioned in the 1970s and 1980s, with the appearance of signs of human life 14,000 years ago in Chile.. Later, traits from cultures older than the Clovis appeared, such as those found in Buttermilk Creek, 15,500, Texas; and the 16,000-year-old Cooper’s Ferry site in Idaho.

Discovery in New Mexico suggests humans may have entered North America during the Ice Age. “I can’t fault the work that was done or the interpretations,” said Gary Haynes, professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The trails are so far south of the Bering Earth Connection that we now have to wonder if people or their ancestors (or other people) had crossed from Asia to the Americas much earlier; if people moved quickly across continents after each crossing; and if they left descendants, ”he added.

For his part, Andrea Manica, geneticist at the University of Cambridge, assured that it is a discovery of historical importance. “I cannot comment on the reliability of the dating (it is outside of my area of ​​expertise), but the strong evidence from humans in North America 23,000 years ago does not match genetics, which shows clearly a separation between Native Americans and Native Americans. Asians about 15-16 thousand years ago, ”he told the BBC. In his view, “this would suggest that the first settlers of the Americas were replaced when the ice corridor formed and another wave of settlers entered. We have no idea how it happened. “