Fossilised human footprints in the gypsum at White Sands National Park (USGS photos, cropped). Photo: United States Geological Survey / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
16 Oct 2026 · White Sands National Park, New Mexico, United States
White Sands footprints re-dated to 23.5–21.7 ka
Kathleen Springer, Jeffrey Pigati, Jessica Tierney and colleagues expanded the excavations at White Sands and found 20 stratigraphic layers with human footprints in place, alongside megafauna trackways and drag lines made by travois. New radiocarbon dates on conifer pollen, combined with dates on aquatic seeds, put the footprint sequence between 23,500 and 21,700 years ago. Pollen, biomarker and sediment data record the lake turning into a playa during a dry spell that matches Dansgaard-Oeschger event 2, about 23,200 years ago.
Why it matters: White Sands is the strongest evidence that people were in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, thousands of years before Clovis. This paper answers the main objection to the earlier dates and adds a detailed climate record for the people who walked there.
Mainstream view: Earlier critiques (for example by David Rhode, David Madsen and Charles Oviatt) argued that the aquatic-seed dates could be too old because of a hard-water effect; the authors say the pollen dates resolve this. No stone tools have been reported from the footprint layers.
Alternative view: Graham Hancock (America Before, 2019) argues the Americas were settled far earlier than the Clovis-first timeline. White Sands supports an earlier arrival of people but says nothing either way about a lost advanced civilisation.
Kelly Graf, Ted Goebel and colleagues report on Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ (formerly McDonald Creek), 55 km south-southeast of Fairbanks. It has three Late Pleistocene occupation layers dated to about 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago. The oldest layer holds more than 80,000 specimens, including a distinctive hafted biface, bone and antler tools, animal remains and well-preserved activity areas.
Enrico Crema and colleagues used statistical models of radiocarbon and site data to track Jomon forager populations around the Kikai-Akahoya eruption about 7,300 years ago, one of the largest of the Holocene (VEI 7). They find a major population collapse in regions next to the volcano, but some nearby populations grew after the disaster, and some distant communities were hit by environmental effects that had been overlooked.
A Science news feature reports that Andean archaeologists are replacing the traditional Inca chronology (empire from 1438) with radiocarbon dates. At Saqsaywaman, dated charcoal suggests the site began to be remodelled with fitted masonry around 1400, with construction peaking from about 1418; the first results are in press at Antiquity.
Nature reported new geophysical survey results, published by Eldamaty, Abbas, Ballard and Reeves in the Amarna Royal Tombs Project’s occasional papers, that they say point to hidden chambers beyond the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb, possibly the burial of Nefertiti.
