Oldest Human Footprints in North America Identified

1/2. These two human prints, originally discovered in 1961, have been dated to be about 10,550 years old. (Photo courtesy Arturo Gonzalez)

A hunter-gatherer who trekked through a desert oasis a hundred centuries ago left the continent’s most lasting impression: the oldest known human footprints in North America.

There are only two of them — one left and one right — but the ancient traveler’s path through mineral-rich sediment in the Chihuahuan Desert allowed them to become enshrined in stone, and now dated, some 10,500 years later.

“To my knowledge the oldest human prints previously reported in North America are around 6,000 years old, so the … prints pre-date these by some 5,000 years,” said Dr. Nicholas Felstead, a geoarchaeologist at Durham University who led a new analysis of the prints.

The tracks were first discovered during highway construction in northeastern Mexico, about 300 kilometers from the Texas border, in 1961. They were excavated and taken to a local museum for study, but their precise location was lost to history. [...] westerndigs.org/

Reference:
Nicholas J. Felstead, Silvia Gonzalez, David Huddart, Stephen R. Noble, Dirk L. Hoffmann, Sarah E. Metcalfe, Melanie J. Leng, Bruce M. Albert, Alistair W.G. Pike, Arturo Gonzalez-Gonzalez, & José Concepción Jiménez-López (2013). Holocene-aged human footprints from the Cuatrociénegas Basin, NE Mexico Journal of Archaeological Science : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.11.010