Footprints of Ice Age hunter-gatherers recently discovered in a desert in the western United States shed new light on the first human settlements in North America.
Dozens of fossilized footprints found in early July in dry river beds in the state of Utah reveal more details about how the inhabitants of this part of the American continent lived more than 12 thousand years ago, just as the planet began to thaw.
The fossils were found by chance by researchers Daron Duke and Thomas Urban, while driving in a car to Hill Air Force Base in the Great Salt Lake Desert, talking about footprints.
“We asked ourselves: ‘How would [as pegadas]?'” Duke explained to AFP. “And he said, ‘Like the ones we’re seeing through the window,'” he added.
The two scientists ended up unearthing 88 footprints belonging to adults and children.
“Their appearance varies from simple discolored patches on the ground to small patches of earth that appear around and on top of them. But they look like footprints,” Duke said.
It took many days of painstaking excavation to ensure that what they were looking at was as old as they thought.
“It looks like barefoot people were walking in shallow water where there was a muddy base,” Duke explained. “When they lifted their feet, the sand settled, keeping [a pegada] perfectly”.
‘hallucinated’
Duke, a member of the Nevada-based Far West Anthropological Research Group, was in the region looking for evidence of prehistoric bonfires of the Shoshone, an indigenous people whose descendants still live in the western United States.
To do this, he turned to Urban, an archaeologist at Cornell University in New York, for his experience in finding evidence of ancient settlements, including the discovery of human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, estimated to be up to 23,000 years old. age.
The new fossils add to a number of other discoveries in the area, such as stone tools, traces of tobacco consumption, bird bones and campfire remains, which are beginning to provide a more complete record of the Shoshone and their continued presence in the area. region 13,000 years ago.
“These are the resident indigenous peoples of North America, this is where they used to live and this is where they still live today,” said Urban, who considers the discovery of the footprints the culmination of his career.
“When I realized that I was digging up a human footprint, that I could see the toes, that I was in perfect condition, I was hallucinated,” he recalled.
And sharing that discovery with the distant descendants of the people who left their footprints was extremely gratifying, he said.
“The connection between something so remote and so human, I believe, eventually affects all of us in some way,” he concluded.
