Humans in the Americas: two mysteries

You can’t carbon-date footprints in the mud, but you can date the ditch grass seeds that are trapped in the mud (now turned into rock) in the layers just above and below those footprints.

White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Archaeologists recently discovered thousands of footprints in the national park, suggesting human beings were in the Americas around 6,000 years before the earliest previously accepted date.Photograph courtesy of Flickr

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

September 30, 2021

LONDON, U.K.—It’s been the biggest shock in archaeology for a long time. British and American archaeologists have found solid evidence that human beings—we could call them the forerunners—were in the Americas around 6,000 years before the earliest previously accepted date. What the archaeol...

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