Humans came to America 21,000-23,000 years ago, confirms New Mexico research

A research carried out on fossilized human footprints found in New Mexico states that humans came to America between 21,000-23,000 years ago.

According to the research published in the journal Science, these footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lake bed in White Sands National Park.

This discovery has now completely altered the belief that humans came to America from Russia as they crossed the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, about 15,000 years ago.

The estimated age of the footprints was reported earlier in the journal in 2021, but Thomas Urban, an archaeological scientist at Cornell Univerity stated that there was a controversy around the date.

"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," said Thomas.

Following the publication of the study's findings in 2021, speculation arose over the possibility that the seeds of aquatic plants employed in the initial dating process may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake, which might have caused radiocarbon dating to be thousands of years wrong.

The study carried out recently affirmed those dates by putting forth two more lines of evidence.

It used to entirely different materials found at the site: ancient conifer pollen and quartz grains.

In order to carry out the research about 75,000 grains of pure pollen from the same sedimentary layer that contained the footprints.

Kathleen Springer, co-author of the new paper and a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, shared, "Dating pollen is arduous and nail-biting,"

In addition to pollen dating, researchers also studied damage in the crystal lattices of ancient quartz grains to produce an age estimate.

"White Sands is unique, because there’s no question these footprints were left by people, it’s not ambiguous," said Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.

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