Prehistoric tracks detail a moment when mammoths, sloths and humans crossed paths
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| The footprints found at White Sands National Park are more than 10,000 years old. (Courtesy of the National Park Service) |
A small woman—or perhaps an
adolescent boy—walks quickly across a landscape where giant beasts roam. The
person holds a toddler on their hip, and their feet slip in the mud as they
hurry along for nearly a mile, perhaps delivering the child to a safe
destination before returning home alone.
Despite the fact that this
journey took place more than 10,000 years ago, a new paper published in the
journal Quaternary Science Reviews manages to sketch out what it might have
looked and felt like in remarkable detail.
Evidence of the journey
comes from fossilized footprints and other evidence discovered in New Mexico’s
White Sands National Park in 2018, reports Albuquerque TV station KRQE. Toward
the end of the late Pleistocene epoch—between 11,550 and 13,000 years
ago—humans and animals left hundreds of thousands of tracks in the mud along
the shore of what was once Lake Otero.
The new paper investigates
one specific set of tracks, noting details in the footprints’ shapes that
reveal how the traveler’s weight shifted as they moved the child from one hip
to the other.
“We can see the evidence
of the carry in the shape of the tracks,” write study co-authors Matthew Robert
Bennett and Sally Christine Reynolds, both of Bournemouth University in
England, for the Conversation. “They are broader due to the load, more varied
in morphology often with a characteristic ‘banana shape’–something that is caused
by outward rotation of the foot.”
At some points along the
journey, the toddler’s footprints appear as well, most likely because the
walker set the child down to rest or adjust their position. For most of the
trip, the older caretaker carried the child at a speed of around 3.8 miles per
hour—an impressive pace considering the muddy conditions.
“Each track tells a story:
a slip here, a stretch there to avoid a puddle,” explain Bennett and Reynolds.
“The ground was wet and slick with mud and they were walking at speed, which
would have been exhausting.”
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| In this artist's depiction, a prehistoric woman holding a child leaves footprints in the mud. (Courtesy of Karen Carr via the National Park Service) |
On the return trip, the
adult or adolescent followed the same course in reverse, this time without the
child. The researchers theorize that this reflects a social network in which
the person knew that they were carrying the child to a safe destination.
“Was the child sick?” they
ask. “Or was it being returned to its mother? Did a rainstorm quickly come in
catching a mother and child off guard? We have no way of knowing and it is easy
to give way to speculation for which we have little evidence.”
The fossilized footprints
show that at least two large animals crossed the human tracks between the
outbound and return trips. Prints left by a sloth suggest the animal was aware
of the humans who had passed the same way before it. As the sloth approached
the trackway, it reared up on its hind legs to sniff for danger before moving
forward. A mammoth who also walked across the tracks, meanwhile, shows no sign
of having noticed the humans’ presence.
White Sands National Park
contains the largest collection of Ice Age human and animal tracks in the
world. As Alamogordo Daily News reports, scientists first found fossilized
footprints at the park more than 60 years ago. But researchers only started
examining the tracks intensively in the past decade, when the threat of erosion
became readily apparent.
The international team of
scientists behind the new paper has found evidence of numerous kinds of human
and animal activity. Tracks testify to children playing in puddles formed by
giant sloth tracks and jumping between mammoth tracks, as well as offering signs
of human hunting practices. Researchers and National Park Service officials say
the newest findings are remarkable partly for the way they allow modern humans
to relate to their ancient forebears.
“I am so pleased to
highlight this wonderful story that crosses millennia,” says Marie Sauter,
superintendent of White Sands National Park, in a statement. “Seeing a child’s
footprints thousands of years old reminds us why taking care of these special
places is so important.”
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