White Sands Footprints

 Along Interstate 70 in southern New Mexico, between the towns of Las Cruces and Alamagordo, about a hundred miles north of the Mexican border town of Juarez, there's a national park called White Sands, which is literally just that -- white sand dunes surrounding an ancient lake bed.

What's fascinating about this location is the discovery of human footprints, footprints that have been dated between 20,000 to 23,000 years old.  The footprints appear to be tracking megafauna -- giant sloths, camels, and mammoths -- around the shores of that ancient lake.  There are children's footprints too, playing amongst the various megafauna prints.

There is, of course, a long-standing question about how the Americas were populated by modern humans.  The supposition has long been that a group of humans migrated from northeastern Siberia over the Bering Strait land bridge that existed during the last Ice Age's maximum.  Presumably there was once a corridor between ice sheets that covered all of what is now Alaska and Canada, and humans traversed that.  Some think people may also have migrated via boats, following the coastline.

What's interesting, though, is that no Native tribes that I'm aware of have any oral history of making such a migration.  If it happened "only" 13,000 years ago, one would think some version of the story would have survived as a founding myth of the peoples involved.  As far as I know -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- there isn't an such an extant mythology amongst any North American native peoples.  They claim that they have always been here.

So, the mystery remains.  Where did the earliest residents of North America come from, and when?  Who were they?  This short clip doesn't pretend to answer those questions, but to pose the implicit question about timing -- if people were in White Sands, New Mexico, 23,000 years ago, they must have arrived some thousands of years earlier.  When, exactly, and from where?

We're not able to definitively answer those questions yet, but I trust the earth will continue to slowly reveal her secrets, by and by.