Institute for Studies in Landscapes and Human Evolution, Bournemouth University, Poole, BH12 5BB, UK.
National Park Service, White Sands National Park, P.O. Box 1086, Holloman AFB, NM 88330, USA.
Science. 2021 Sep 24;373(6562):1528-1531. doi: 10.1126/science.abg7586. Epub 2021 Sep 23.
Archaeologists and researchers in allied fields have long sought to understand human colonization of North America. Questions remain about when and how people migrated, where they originated, and how their arrival affected the established fauna and landscape. Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.
考古学家和相关领域的研究人员长期以来一直试图了解人类对北美洲的殖民。关于人类何时以及如何迁移、他们的起源地以及他们的到来如何影响已建立的动物群和景观等问题仍然存在。在这里，我们提供了来自新墨西哥州白沙国家公园（美国）挖掘表面的证据，在那里，多个原地人类足迹在地层上受到限制，并被种子层所包围，这些种子层提供了在大约 23 到 21 千年前校准的放射性碳年龄。这些发现证实了人类在末次冰盛期存在于北美洲，为人类对美洲的殖民的古老性提供了证据，并为早期居民和更新世巨型动物群的共存提供了时间范围的扩展。
