Who Was Here

Who was here in the Americas when the first European explorers arrived? Millions of people had lived on both North and South American continents when Columbus and others arrived close to 1500. The latest archaeological evidence just recently discovered in New Mexico suggests that there were human beings here as early as 18,000 BC. White Sands National Park in New Mexico sits within the Tularosa Basin, a closed desert basin with no natural drainage outlet, bounded by the San Andres Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east. The basin once held Paleolake Otero, a shallow lake that filled it during the last Ice Age; because the basin has no outlet, the lake's gypsum-rich sediments were never carried away. Within this gypsum sediment are the footprints: human tracks pressed into mud at the ancient lake's edge, then buried and preserved as the basin dried around them. These footprints are the oldest securely dated evidence of human presence in the Americas. Radiocarbon dating of layers bracketing the tracks places them at roughly ~23,000—21,000 years ago, roughly 2,000 years of repeated human activity when people repeatedly walked along the wet margins of ancient Lake Otero. Here below is a photo of the footprints of one of those first human beings in America.