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For the past century, scientists have debated over when humans first set foot in the Americas. But in 2021, aon a set of human footprints discovered in the White Sands National Park in New Mexico blew the whole mystery wide open again.
"This opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of the peopling of the Americas," Summer Praetorius, a paleoceanographer at the US Geological Survey who was not involved in the study,For decades, the general — yet iffy — scientific consensus was that humans populated the Americas some 13,000 years ago as the Ice Age retreated, or maybe as long as 16,000 years ago.
That wasn't good enough for critics, who pointed out that ruppia, being an aquatic plant, was an unreliable source for radiocarbon analysis, as it could have absorbed carbon atoms from the water instead of the air. But, they went one step further: dating the soil itself using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence. In a nutshell, it uses quartz grains as timekeepers, as their crystalline structures accumulate energy over time that's released by exposure to sunlight.
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Footprints in New Mexico are likely oldest sign of humans in the Americas, scientists sayNew research shows that fossil footprints discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in New Mexico date to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.
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Footprints found at ancient lake in New Mexico challenge old belief of first humans in AmericasNew research finds that humans might have first entered the New World not over the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, but thousands of years earlier.
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Oldest fossil human footprints in North America confirmedNew research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, NM, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought. In September 2021, scientists announced that ancient human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. This discovery pushed the known date of human presence in North America back by thousands of years and implied that early inhabitants and megafauna co-existed for several millennia before the terminal Pleistocene extinction event. In a follow-up study, researchers used two new independent approaches to date the footprints, both of which resulted in the same age range as the original estimate.
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Footprints found at ancient lake challenge old belief of first humans in AmericasToday's Video Headlines: 10\/06\/23
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These footprints confirm that humans were in North America several millenia earlier than previously thoughtGet the latest news on Cleveland and the Northeast Ohio environment. Find science and technology news updates at cleveland.com
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