Article Oldest footprints in North America reinforced as dating up to 23,000 years old

[C C]

https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles...rs-old.htm

EXCERPTS: In 2021, a groundbreaking study unearthed ancient footprints at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, sparking debates about their accuracy. According to previous theories, people first appeared in North America between 13,500 and 16,000 years ago.

An extensive follow-up investigation was carried out by a group of scientists, including co-author Jeff Pigati, a research geologist with the USGS, to validate these results.

[...] In the new study, radiocarbon dating was applied to conifer pollen found in the same layers as the seeds, offering another line of evidence. Kathleen Springer, a co-author and USGS research geologist, emphasized the importance of testing results using multiple methods. The USGS team remained confident in their original ages due to strong geological, hydrological, and stratigraphic evidence, but they recognized the need for independent chronological validation.

Isolating a substantial 75,000 pollen grains from the same layer, they determined that the pollen's age was statistically identical to that of the Ruppia cirrhosa seeds. Additionally, the researchers used optically stimulated luminescence to date quartz grains in the footprints, revealing a minimum age of approximately 21,500 years.

With three corroborating pieces of evidence, the USGS contends that the age range of 21,000 to 23,000 years is highly unlikely to be incorrect... (MORE - missing details)

https://youtu.be/aCr5Ukx0V7w

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/aCr5Ukx0V7w

[C C]

The 1st Americans were not who we thought they were
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/...-they-were

EXCERPT: According to the Clovis First theory, every Indigenous person in the Americas could be traced to this single, inland migration, said Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University.

But in recent decades, several discoveries have revealed that humans first reached the so-called New World thousands of years before we initially thought and probably didn't get there by an inland route.

So who were the first Americans, and how and when did they arrive?

Genetic studies suggest that the first people to arrive in the Americas descend from an ancestral group of Ancient North Siberians and East Asians that mingled around 20,000 to 23,000 years ago. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge sometime between then and 15,500 years ago, said David Meltzer, an archaeologist and professor of prehistory in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and author of the book "First Peoples in a New World, 2nd Edition" (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

But some archaeological sites hint that people may have reached the Americas far earlier than that.

For instance, there are fossilized human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico that may date to 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. That would mean humans arrived in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which occurred between about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of what is now Alaska, Canada and the northern U.S.

Other, more equivocal data suggest the first people arrived in the Western Hemisphere by 25,000 or even 31,500, years ago. If these dates can be confirmed, they would paint a much more complex picture of how and when humans reached the Americas... (MORE - missing details)