This Oct. 2023 photo made available by the National Park Service shows human footprints infilled with white gypsum sand at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Fossil human footprints discovered in White Sands, New Mexico likely date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to two lines of scientific evidence published Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.
That’s considerably earlier than once-conventional wisdom, which set the arrival of humans in North America about 15,000 years ago, shortly before rising sea levels covered the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates.
“This is a subject that’s always been controversial because it’s so significant — it’s about how we understand the last chapter of the peopling of the world,” Thomas Urban, an archaeological scientist at Cornell University, who was involved in the 2021 study but not the new one, told the AP.