Science News / Footprints In The Ash

• Subscribe •

In This Issue

Let’s Get Vertical: City buildings offer opportunities for farms to grow up instead of out
Dead — but not duds: White dwarfs shed light on physics and the fate of the cosmos
The Science Vote: Science News runs down what the two presidential candidates and their campaigns have been saying about science and technology issues.
This week's table of contents

Footprints in the ash

By Sid Perkins

July 5th, 2008; Vol.174 #1

Text Size

Humans may have been walking around what is now central Mexico 40,000 years ago

HUMAN PRINTSFootprints (one left) left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years could be evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer than previously confirmed. Laser scans of the prints (right) confirm their human origins, the researchers report today at the American Geophysical Union meeting.Gonzalez

Footprints left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years ago are evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer than previously confirmed, a new study suggests.

Analyses of three-dimensional laser scans of the imprints (example at right) confirm their human origin, says Silvia Gonzalez, a geoarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England.

Previous finds of human remains elsewhere in the region couldn’t be precisely dated because they were found in layers of mixed gravels that probably incorporated materials of many different ages.

However, a new analysis of the coarse-grained, print-ridden volcanic ash — which would have hardened quickly after it fell, says Gonzalez — strongly suggest the material fell around 40,000 years ago, she and her colleagues reported today in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Excavations at several sites have suggested that humans have inhabited the Western Hemisphere for at least 20,000 years, but results suggesting dates of occupation before 14,000 years ago typically haven’t been confirmed and remain controversial.

Nevertheless, says Gonzalez, recent excavations at a site in Baja California have unearthed a rock shelter containing heaps of shells that have been carbon-dated as 44,000 years old, a finding that bolsters the notion that people lived throughout the region about 40 millennia ago.

Found in: Archaeology, Chemistry and Humans

Share & Save

Comments 11

Unfortunately even with the seemingly overwhelming evidence for human populations existing much later then the end of the Pleistocene, 15,000-20,000 years ago, in the Americans, most textbooks (at least those from survey courses) don't give much weight to the idea. These findings are quite interesting, as are the numerous finds at Monte Verde and a greater understanding of Beringia. Also neither science nor religion need be "proven". Science analyzes data which either supports hypotheses or not. Religion need only be concerned with faith, doctrine does not need to be compatible with scientific evidence to be of value in a spiritual sense.

John Collins

Sep. 19, 2008 at 9:21am
There are a plethora of evidences that humans have existed for much, much longer than the current popular theories of evolution allow for. But not unlike any system of belief that becomes institutionalized, academic archaeology systematically punishes those who defy the official dogma. Now don't mistake, I am not siding with the sensationalist UFO geeks or biblical creationists, though the truth is not solidly in the camp of the notion that advanced civilization is only a few thousand years old, nor with those who contend that Homo sapiens has only existed in the Americas for less than 20,000 years. It is amazing to see purported scientists persecuting their own version of heretics, only a short few hundred years after Copernicus and Galileo and others were persecuted for questioning another dogma.
The Vedic tradition, among the oldest set of human documents in existence, came up with a figure of the earth's age at something like 4.5 billion. Again, modern science has no monopoly on truth.

Jeffrey Archer

Aug. 31, 2008 at 6:09pm
If the correct findings/proof were all published as found and dated correctly, the credibility of most Religions would be lost,and the reputations of many would be lost as well.
We will only be able to report what is acceptable by main stream science.

molo

Jul. 18, 2008 at 11:58am
John, not surprisingly, that's not what the other team says:

"I am amazed that they are still flogging that dead horse," said Paul Renne, of the University of California, Berkeley's Geochronology Center. Renne led that team that initially dated the Valsequillo Basin strata. "We are about to publish even more data showing that the rocks are 1.3 million years old and that the 'footprints' are not," he said.

Ellery Frahm

Jul. 7, 2008 at 12:53pm
what happened to the 1.3 ma was that its perpetrators having endured the slings and arrows of preclovites reinvestigated their findings and learned that they had erred and that they should have said 45-40 ka instead....now, everyone is happy

john

John white

Jul. 6, 2008 at 3:10pm
What happened to the argon isotopic dating of the ash at 1.3 million years old and the paleomagnetic dating of 1.07 to 1.77 million years old? Those dates were reported in Nature back in December 2005. If the ash is, in fact, 1.3 million years old, those cannot be human footprints -- there is no evidence of Homo erectus in the Americas.

Ellery Frahm

Jun. 26, 2008 at 1:56pm
"Such as the nonsensicle theory of a bering strait migration"

Never heard it put quit like that. Care to present an alternative theory as to how humans found themselves in the America's 40,000+ years ago? Can you provide a link to information about the Central American Site?

Paul Garrison

Jun. 7, 2008 at 10:32am
Yup, I agree with the wet cement theory.

JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

John Thmas

Jun. 4, 2008 at 6:49am
These discoveries were made in September 2003 and a press conference was held by Gonzalez, Moores, David Huddart and Matthew Bennett in July 2005, three years ago, during which they all announced the exact same thing. I suppose this new announcement is because the previous findings were ignored since the truth about human settlements in the western hemisphere does not match the prevailing paradigms such as the nonsensical theory of a bering strait migration. The facts speak for themselves though, including the Allendale County site in North Carolina that has toolpoints and a fire ring whose charcoal dated at 50,000 BCE. There is also an interesting site in Central America that has been dated to 250,000 BCE.

These findings provide problems for the academics that have spent their lives promoting the theory of homo sapien emergence out of africa at 60,000 BCE.

William Bennett

Jun. 3, 2008 at 11:34pm
Hi Ray: the ash is wet cement, not hot lava

xznofile

May. 30, 2008 at 12:12pm
Having trouble understanding how human barefoot prints were made in hot volcanic ash if "it hardened quickly after it fell".

Ray

May. 30, 2008 at 11:37am