Original subtitles

♪ ♪

KIRK JOHNSON: White Sands National Park, New Mexico...

A vast, open desert that holds clues to a lost past.

DAVID BUSTOS: At White Sands,

all good stories sort of begin with a Bigfoot.

JOHNSON: Footprints dating all the way back to the last Ice Age.

All these circular things are fossil footprints.

JOHNSON: That's amazing.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Mammoths over 13 feet tall.

(mammoth grunting)

Dire wolves, camels,

and enormous ground sloths

that roamed North America thousands of years ago.

White Sands has so many hidden treasures.

There's all these trackways here,

it's just such an incredible discovery.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Alongside them,

something even more astounding.

That is a human footprint.

Yeah, so there's

a human footprint right there.

(laughing): Wow.

JOHNSON: Ancient human journeys

printed on the landscape.

When you make tracks in sand,

they just blow away.

When you make tracks in a place like this,

where the chemistry is just right,

the tracks can last forever.

(voiceover): Now a team of experts is investigating

how these remarkable tracks could shed new light

on life in the Ice Age.

MATTHEW BENNETT: There's a double trail.

Somebody going this way, and somebody going that way.

JOHNSON: Wow, that is really incredible.

(voiceover): How long ago were they made?

KATHLEEN SPRINGER: That's amazing.

MAN: Yeah.

SPRINGER: The Ice Age megafauna went extinct

about 11,500 years ago.

So they're at least that old.

How much older than that

is really anyone's guess at this point.

JOHNSON: Could they provide new information about

early peoples of the Americas?

It really does put our feet prints

firmly into the past here in North America.

KIM CHARLIE: Here's our proof.

Footprints, footprints of our ancestors.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Can the secrets of these ancient footprints

help answer the questions

when and how did humans first arrive in North America?

♪ ♪

"Ice Age Footprints"...

Right now on "NOVA."

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: The dazzling dunes of

White Sands National Park.

Sand as bright as fresh snow.

♪ ♪

But hidden within this landscape

are traces of an ancient story

dating all the way back to the last Ice Age.

When we search for evidence of life

in the ice ages in North America,

we find things like the bones of mammoths

or maybe even hearth stones or spear points

from the people that used to live here,

and very rarely we find the remains of those humans.

But the story is still so incomplete,

there's so much more information we need to find.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: That's why the discovery of footprints

here at White Sands is so significant.

Could they help answer some of the greatest mysteries

of the Ice Age?

♪ ♪

The precise location of this site

is a secret.

These dunes cover

nearly 300 square miles...

with some rising over 50 feet.

I'm driving through these snow-white dunes.

It's kind of a surreal landscape.

Once we get through the dunes,

we'll be out in the great ancient lakebed,

and it's absolutely covered with tracks.

(voiceover): I'm Kirk Johnson.

As a paleontologist,

I've spent most of my career

studying the remains of ancient life.

But footprints can tell

really detailed stories about the past.

♪ ♪

30 minutes later,

we've reached our destination:

a huge dried-up lakebed.

As the wind scours this remote area,

new prints are being revealed, and old ones disappear.

It seems like such an improbable place

to even look for tracks.

(voiceover): Joining me is David Bustos.

He's leading the team of scientists

investigating the footprints.

BUSTOS: You look out and it's just bleak desert,

and who would think that there's all these trackways here?

JOHNSON (voiceover): As my eyes adjust to the brightness,

round patterns start to appear.

So there's one there... Yes.

And there and there,

and there and there, there...

BUSTOS: Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Those are amazing.

Uh-huh.

♪ ♪

(voiceover): The mysterious shapes are over five feet apart,

and nearly two feet across.

These are the fossilized tracks of an Ice Age giant...

a Columbian mammoth.

It died more than 10,000 years ago,

but its footprints remain.

♪ ♪

(mammoth trumpeting)

The tracks are preserved in various ways.

Sometimes the wind fills them with different textured sand,

leaving ghostly impressions,

while others dry into hard casts which are exposed

when the softer ground around them erodes away.

One of the things that really stand out at White Sands

is just thousands and thousands of footprints preserved.

In this area, we'll see trackways

that go for ten miles in one direction

and two or three miles in another direction.

You know, there might be

over 100,000 prints throughout this large area.

Do... it's okay to walk on them?

We can walk near them and around them,

as long as we don't disturb the surface below

or add more sediment in.

JOHNSON (voiceover): We need to be careful not to

step on the fragile prints...

and the team tries to only visit the trackway areas

when the ground is dry,

and hard enough to support their weight.

The surface is always changing.

We are seeing more erosion.

Every year, more and more prints are becoming visible.

JOHNSON (voiceover): And along with the many mammoth prints here,

we soon spot traces of another large creature.

BUSTOS: They're very common,

they'll sort of look like an S shape...

Yep. You'll see them connecting to each other.

There's one here, right?

Yep. There's another one coming through...

I think as well, right there.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Twice the size of a human foot,

and with giant, curved claws,

these are the prints of a massive ground sloth,

a beast more than double the weight of a grizzly bear,

that walked this land thousands of years ago.

(sloth panting)

So that's sort of how the story of White Sands began.

People, they've seen these incredible footprints,

and they thought that it was Bigfoot.

(chuckling): Bigfoot with three weird claws.

Yes.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Then we discover something even more special.

That is a human footprint.

Yeah, so there's... there's a human footprint right there.

(laughing): Wow.

Yeah, so if you look...

That is amazing.

Here's the heel.

Okay. Right here.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Scattered across the landscape

are human footprints

from thousands of years ago.

Each track is the trace of an ancient person,

the shape of their bare feet locked in the sediment.

Look at this, this is amazing here.

This actually looks like a human print right in there.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): Could these extraordinary human footprints

help answer two big questions:

when did people first set foot in North America?

And did their arrival contribute to

the disappearance of giant Ice Age animals?

20,000 years ago,

Earth was in the grip of an ice age.

The climate was colder,

vast ice sheets covered much of North America...

and White Sands was not a desert,

but a huge lake... Lake Otero.

♪ ♪

The lakeshore surrounding it teemed with life.

Giant ground sloths wielding big claws

shared this wetland with mammoths

weighing up to ten tons.

Alongside them,

packs of dire wolves hunting for a kill,

and hardy North American camels.

These Ice Age giants disappeared from the fossil record

over 10,000 years ago.

So the human footprints here are probably at least that old.

♪ ♪

But they could be much older.

What can they reveal about the deep history

of humans on this continent,

and how they met the challenges of life in the Ice Age?

♪ ♪

To find out,

David has assembled a team of scientists

to uncover the tracks' hidden secrets.

BENNETT: I'm confident in it now,

that that's mammoth, and it links to your one in the,

um, that you've got in cross section there.

Cross section over there? Okay. Yeah.

JOHNSON: One of them is Matthew Bennett,

a forensic footprint expert from England.

♪ ♪

On the eastern side of the ancient lake,

close to the restricted area of

the White Sands Missile Range,

Matthew is excavating a remarkable set

of human footprints.

JOHNSON: Hey, Matthew,

how's it going?

It's going well.

These are amazing. They are.

Are these... so, are these

just the ones you've exposed this afternoon, then?

Yep, there's a double trail.

Um, somebody going this way, and somebody going that way.

How far do they go off in that direction?

So, in that direction,

about three-quarters of a mile,

something like that, and then they go to

the boundary fence on the missile range

and an unknown distance into the missile range.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: How common is it to have a track this long?

BENNETT: Okay, so I've looked at tracks

all around the world, and this, to my knowledge,

is the longest human trackway anywhere in the world.

JOHNSON: Oh, that's amazing.

Could it be the same person going away and coming back?

Absolutely. They're the same size.

It's actually quite a small individual.

It could be a woman,

but could be a male adolescent equally.

The size is...

Looks like a size five or something. Yeah.

But the tracks are very big.

There's sort of 30% of the track,

maybe more is pure slippage.

It's very wet and slippery conditions

as the individual has been moving.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Some are clearly defined imprints,

but many are stretched out and distorted,

an indication that the walker was moving fast,

and slipping on wet, muddy ground.

Some prints are bent out of shape,

from a foot sliding sideways,

which could mean

the person was carrying something on their journey.

BENNETT: They were also carrying a child.

Oh, they're carrying a child as well?

They're carrying a child.

How do you know that they're carrying a child?

BENNETT: Along the trackway, there are very small,

tiny little children's prints.

They sort of face the direction of travel.

So if you imagine you were carrying a child on your hip

and you wanted to readjust, you...

you put it down... Right.

...and then you readjust,

and there's a few small child prints,

pick the child up again and carry on.

Just over to here...

JOHNSON (voiceover): A little farther along the same trackway,

Matthew discovers a twist in the story.

The travelers were not alone.

What's this unusual set of tracks?

So there are a series of sloth tracks here

entering from, from...

to the left there... So this is the first one.

And then it comes out over here.

That's really the amazing one,

you can see the claws of the sloth so clearly.

BENNETT: You can, yeah.

It's a beautiful, a beautiful track.

They're not large tracks. Yeah.

So it's a relatively small sloth.

Bear-size, I would have suggested.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Was this sloth here

at the same time as the humans?

The sloth's footprints are right on top of

the outbound human track.

Which means this animal must have arrived

after the travelers first passed by.

Where do they actually step on the human track?

So... Is it this one?

It's actually just over there.

There's an example where they,

they cut across the human track.

But the sloth did something quite cool.

It seems to have gone from all fours up onto its hind legs.

It's done a little dance around...

And then it goes off that way.

So it crawls in kind of like sloth-like,

and then as it gets here,

it kind of pivots around and up

and looks, looks...

Looks, scents the air, and off.

...and pivots

and then heads off that way.

That's correct.

A little sloth dance.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Matthew thinks the sloth

noticed the human tracks and reacted.

Either the sloth's either visually responding to the track

or it smells something.

My instinct is smell.

It basically reared up to scent the air a little bit more

and then decided to, to disappear off.

They're not here at the same time,

but within a few minutes, hours of each other,

they're here.

(chuckling): That's a phenomenal thing.

Some small person having a stroll

on a landscape full of giant ground sloths.

(voiceover): The tracks at White Sands show

just how close humans here came to Ice Age animals.

Imagine what it must have been like

to meet one of these enormous beasts in the flesh.

(sloth groaning)

♪ ♪

You can get a sense of these Ice Age encounters

at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

Here, animals that wandered into tar deposits were trapped,

and their bones were preserved.

In the last century, experts have unearthed

more than a million fossils here.

EMILY LINDSEY: Hey.

Hey Emily, how are you doing?

Good, how are you?

Nice to see you again. Good to see you.

Welcome to the Tar Pits. Thanks.

Oh, here's our sloth, huh? Yeah.

This thing is amazing, so massive.

It's majestic.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Curator Emily Lindsey works with fossils of the giant beasts

that lived in North America during the last Ice Age.

So how much do you think this guy weighed?

Probably more than a ton.

And when people talk about sloths,

they talk about how they move so slowly,

would this guy have moved slowly?

You know, it wouldn't have been like,

a runner... Yeah.

...but it wouldn't have been so slow as the modern sloths

that are really only adapted for living in trees.

What would an animal like this eat?

So they were mostly herbivores,

and it looks like they were eating a lot of

kind of desert shrubs

that would have been prevalent in the area.

Sloths are part of this very strange group of animals

called Xenarthrans, and it includes the sloths,

the armadillos,

and the anteaters.

And like armadillos, some species

produced bony armor, only in this case,

it's in the form of these

small sort of pebble-like bones

that were embedded inside its skin.

Oh, that's why I love sloths so much.

(laughing): They're so cool,

they're such amazing animals.

Yeah, they're one of the weirdest animals,

and it's a piece of ecology

that has just completely gone from earth.

(indistinct chatter)

JOHNSON (voiceover): Nearby, I've spotted another

lost species whose tracks we see at White Sands.

This is an amazing beast, isn't it?

Yeah, the Columbian mammoth.

JOHNSON (voiceover): From fossil evidence,

we know that mammoths arrived in North America

around 1.8 million years ago.

When you stand beneath the skeletons of these huge animals,

you can't help but wonder,

why did they go extinct less than 13,000 years ago?

Was it because of a change in climate?

Or human influence?

Or a combination of the two?

LINDSEY: It seems to have been a really rapid event.

As we we're coming out of the Ice Age,

we're going through all these big climate upheavals,

so we need to know how much overlap

there actually was between when humans arrived

and when the last animals disappeared

in order to know what role humans might have played

in that extinction.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): The footprints at White Sands

might be the oldest human prints ever found in North America.

They could shed new light on the lives of Indigenous peoples

and their long history on this continent.

It's, it's just so amazing to see these tracks...

There's another one crossing there.

Yeah.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Today, I'm visiting

the U.S. Army's White Sands missile range,

just across the boundary from the national park.

Here there are more animal prints,

including those of a mammoth,

and this magnificent trackway of a ground sloth,

crossed by the footprints of an ancient camel.

Can you imagine this whole area

with all these animals here?

Would have been amazing, huh? (sighing): Oh.

Mammoths, sloths, cats, dogs. Yeah.

Right? Yes.

I always say we need to build a time machine.

(laughter)

JOHNSON (voiceover): Joining me are Joe Watkins,

an archaeologist and member of

the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma,

and Kim Charlie from the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico.

They want to see the prints for themselves,

and learn more about

the people who once walked across this landscape.

We have this tie where us Native Americans

have been here for a very long time.

And I believe that, you know, I really believe that.

And that ties back into, you know,

our migration stories where

we evolved somewhere, but we don't

specifically know where.

These are stories that

we believe in our hearts as tribes,

pueblos, you know, that we take, that we hold sacred to us.

So when we come back to these areas

and we find evidence of footprints

of our thousands of great ancestors,

you know, we just kind of, like, it's amazing.

So we did exist here.

The tribes talk about going way back.

We all talk about having been here forever.

We've never been anywhere else.

We have the evidence, it really does

put our feet prints

firmly into the past here in North America.

These are our relatives.

We've been here since time immemorial

and hopefully we'll continue on.

JOHNSON (voiceover): When Europeans arrived

on this continent, they began a pattern of

ignoring the rights and stories

of Indigenous peoples.

With the colonization in the 14, 1500s,

a lot of tribal histories have either been lost

or have been pushed back or have been tossed aside.

This was once our land, you know.

Mother Earth was our mother... Mm-hmm.

...and we're the descendants of her.

And we're the people that try to take care of it,

but you've got the Western people

have come in and just taken over areas where,

you know, they have no respect.

Please understand that

we Native Americans were here first.

It's kind of an awful thing

where we've been put on little reservations.

You know, where we once had the freedom to roam.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): European-Americans not only

took control of Indigenous territories,

but some also spread

misleading narratives about Indigenous people.

(indistinct chatter)

♪ ♪

WATKINS: There's pretty much always been a conflict

between archaeologists and American Indians.

In many ways,

archaeologists have taken over.

They've sort of colonized American Indian history,

and they felt that they, they're the ones

who tell the true story of the past.

So there's been that conflict between

whose story is the true history.

Archaeologists also

came out to archaeological sites,

started excavating,

took the materials, took them back to museums,

and tribal people never saw them again.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Over the centuries,

some white scholars used archaeology

as a way to dismiss Indigenous people's accounts

and ancestral connections to the land.

It really wasn't until 40 years ago

that Indians had a say in who was excavating

and what happened with the results of those excavations.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Here at White Sands,

the scientists are consulting with local tribes

and pueblos to study and record these important prints.

They hope to solve one of the biggest mysteries of all:

when did humans first arrive in North America?

Fossil records show that by at least 100,000 years ago,

modern humans... Homo sapiens...

Began spreading from Africa across the planet.

The Americas were surrounded by ocean

and out of reach.

But during the last Ice Age, massive ice sheets formed

and sea levels dropped by over 400 feet,

exposing land between Siberia and Alaska.

Many scientists agree

that this is how humans got to North America.

But when exactly did they first arrive?

Throughout the 20th century, many archaeologists

thought the answer lay in these stone projectile points

found all across North America.

They were made by people from what became known as

the Clovis culture.

WATKINS: I have a replica

Clovis point with me.

They look about like this.

Some are larger, some are smaller.

There's a very characteristic flake

that's taken out of the base

up to the middle of the point.

JOHNSON: The oldest known Clovis points

are about 13,000 years old.

And for a long time, many archaeologists

thought that humans arrived in North America

no earlier than that.

So these Clovis points have been found

all across North America,

from the Atlantic coast on the east,

all the way out into the, the west coast.

So with this, such a broad geographical span of material,

it's why most archaeologists thought

that Clovis was the first archaeological culture

in North America.

JOHNSON (voiceover): More recently,

this view has been challenged by the excavation of

older sites, with stone artifacts

that suggest humans lived in North America

at least 2,000 years

before the Clovis culture.

♪ ♪

There are some archaeological sites...

one in Florida, one in Texas...

that date about 15,000, 15,200 years ago.

So those are currently the oldest dates we have

for the early peopling of the New World.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: But now the discoveries at White Sands

may support even earlier dates,

and could shed new light on

how people came to North America.

About 20,000 years ago was the peak of the last Ice Age,

the Last Glacial Maximum.

Gigantic ice sheets blocked the route into North America.

But there's geological evidence that as the climate warmed,

an ice-free corridor opened up.

Was this how humans reached the rest of the continent?

So one thing about the ice-free corridor,

it didn't really open up

until 13, 14,000 years ago.

So if it wasn't open,

it wasn't likely that anyone could have come that way

and come in to North America.

JOHNSON: If the tracks at White Sands pre-date the ice-free corridor,

they will add more weight

to the idea that humans arrived here earlier

than many archaeologists previously thought.

♪ ♪

Searching for clues,

David Bustos is studying some other remarkable human prints.

I don't know if you can see right here,

this might be more of a child.

It's about, maybe, four, four inches or so across.

And it's right next to an adult print.

You don't normally think of, you know,

taking your child all the way across the country or so,

unless you're, um, if you're hunting,

you might leave the child back at home,

but we see the children everywhere,

so they're part of the scene or part of the landscape.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: The footprints tell stories of Ice Age life.

But how long ago were these people here?

♪ ♪

In order to date the prints,

the team has dug a trench.

(rocks rumbling)

It reveals layers of sediment,

deposited over many years,

along the shore of this ancient lake.

Stamped on these buried surfaces are human prints,

and the further down they are, the older they are.

But just how old are they?

I can put them both on.

Okay, sure.

JOHNSON: To help find the answer, David has been joined

by geologists Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pigati,

who is also an expert in radiocarbon dating.

♪ ♪

You've cut a cross section... What are you trying to see

with the cross section? SPRINGER: So the footprints themselves

are just an impression on a surface,

there's nothing to date.

It's an inorganic thing, you have to find something organic

that you can date above and below the footprints,

and get good dates on them,

so that you can actually say,

"That footprint is between these two ages."

JOHNSON (voiceover): In this trench, Kathleen and Jeff have made a crucial find.

♪ ♪

Sandwiched in the layers above and below the footprints

are scatterings of ancient seeds,

precious organic material which the team can date.

That way they can establish a window of time,

for when the prints were made.

There were actually plants growing on this,

on the surface when, you know,

these critters were walking around.

So the same layers that have the tracks will have the seeds.

Absolutely, above and below them. Yeah.

Yes, so above and below them,

that way we can constrain in time.

So your seeds are effectively little timepieces, right?

They're like little clocks or something buried in the...

They're little capsules, yeah.

And basically the, the...

these things are really resistant to, to decay.

And so they look like they were put down on the,

on the landscape just yesterday, but, in fact,

they might be tens and, you know,

tens of thousands of years old.

JOHNSON (voiceover): Jeff will take the seeds back to his lab in Denver,

and use radiocarbon dating to find out how old they are.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: When I talk to you in six months' time,

either you have what you expect,

PIGATI: Mm-hm. which is around 12,000 years,

or you have humans here earlier than you expect,

or mammoths are here later than you expect.

PIGATI: Something's going to be pretty cool either way, right?

So it seems like you're going to get

a really interesting result no matter what the result is here.

PIGATI: It is a win-win, no question about it. Yeah.

That's a rare thing in paleontology.

PIGATI: It's kind of nice. Yeah.

JOHNSON: Dying to hear what you find out.

Yeah. Yeah, us too, us too.

JOHNSON (voiceover): The trackways at White Sands are constantly changing...

as the wind erodes away the surface to reveal new prints,

it's also turning existing ones to dust.

BUSTOS: It's great because we can see the prints,

but then they are rapidly blowing away.

So we want to capture the data before it's gone.

Some of these really soft ones like this,

once they're exposed, in a few months they'll be gone.

Some type of, you know, priceless data is, is being...

is right here, is being lost.

It's the surface, we're losing the surface,

and these are where all the prints are.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: To record this precious evidence before the wind blows it away,

the team is mapping the site using aerial imagery.

BUSTOS: One of the main reasons is to fly over the area

and then get an elevation model

so we can see where these prints are.

And then we're gonna re-fly it again,

and so with that we'll be able to look at

from this year to next year

we'll see how much erosion's happening,

so we can see how fast

the prints are moving and going away.

JOHNSON: One question they hope to answer using digital imaging

is whether the people here were hunting the giant animals.

David shows me an intriguing set of tracks that may hold clues.

Dave, what kind of image is this?

BUSTOS: It's a photogrammetry.

You know, so basically overlapping photos.

I think in this image,

there might have been 400 or 500 different images

and they're all stitched together.

You can, you know, tip the images upside down,

see it in different directions.

So this image right here

is actually a giant ground sloth.

It's walking along.

These are hind and fore feet, so when they weave in and out,

what you see is a hind foot,

and then the forefoot comes in front

with the very long claw.

And then right here, it changes.

So it stands up, actually.

JOHNSON (voiceover): What caused this sudden change in behavior?

David has a theory.

BUSTOS: If you look close, you'll see a set of human tracks,

And what's really exciting, we took measurements.

You can see they're running toward the sloth.

If you're in the field,

you'd actually see where they're almost toe to toe, you know,

almost chest to chest, it looks like.

I don't know if they're throwing a spear

or what they're doing, but they come right up to each other.

The sloth's spinning around and making, like,

it looks like a sweeping motion.

Actually, there's claw marks on the ground.

There's another set of human prints

sort of running up along this direction.

JOHNSON (voiceover): David believes these trackways

are evidence that humans were actually hunting sloths.

(sloth grunts)

But what was it like to take on such big animals?

(sloth growls)

La Brea Museum curator Emily Lindsey

has investigated how humans hunted them.

So these are our collections

where we keep all of the fossils that have been excavated

over the last hundred years.

There's millions of fossils here.

Yeah, there are literally millions of fossils here.

And here are some of our sloth claws.

JOHNSON: Oh man, look at those things,

these are serious claws.

What did they use the claws for?

Some paleontologists think they might have used them

to dig roots out of the ground.

They've found burrows

that they think these guys dug there,

where there's actually scratch marks on the wall

that line up with the the hands of giant sloths.

But, of course,

they would have been really useful for defense, as well.

JOHNSON (voiceover): But despite their fearsome appearance,

archaeological evidence shows that ground sloths

might have been on the menu

for hungry humans.

LINDSEY: You know, we have a couple of sites

that have been found where it looks pretty clear

that humans were, if not hunting,

at least butchering giant ground sloths.

We've got stone tools

and we've got cut marks on the bones.

Although we have many more sites

that show humans hunting

and eating things like mammoths and horses and camels

than we do of giant sloths.

So, they may have been a food source of last resort.

Maybe bison tastes better, or...

Yeah, given the types of plants

that we find in the sloth dung.

You know, desert plants

that tend to have a lot of chemicals in them.

They might not have tasted very good.

Huh, interesting.

So what kind of techniques were humans using

to hunt and kill these animals?

LINDSEY: They had spears, but, of course,

the most important tool that humans had

were their big brains and their social groups

and ability to communicate. Hm.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): Teamwork and planning,

these were the keys to bringing down huge Ice Age beasts.

♪ ♪

But once the animal was dead,

what did people do with all that meat?

♪ ♪

One of the challenges you have, if you're,

if you're living in this environment,

or hunting in this environment, is how do you get your meat

from where you kill the animal to where you camp?

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Dan Odess is an expert

in prehistoric archaeology.

He searches for evidence to show how humans might have dealt

with the animals they killed.

And alongside the footprints,

he shows me a very different kind of track.

DAN ODESS: We have these, these really interesting

linear structures.

There are four of them.

You can see here one, two, three, four.

JOHNSON: What could have caused these strange marks in the sand?

ODESS: We were kind of wondering

initially, could this be a product of animal behavior

rather than human behavior?

But, interestingly,

one of the things we see

and you can see it very clearly in this one,

we've got people walking along behind it.

JOHNSON: Dan believes this is important archaeological evidence

of human engineering.

They're, they're drag lines.

So impressions left in the mud

as somebody probably pulled

a pole or poles. Okay.

With presumably meat or something else on them.

JOHNSON: And that's a typical way to move meat around?

I think this is the first time

it's been described for the Ice Age.

JOHNSON (voiceover): The team thinks these tracks

could be the earliest known evidence of an ancient device

used to carry heavy loads, such as large amounts of meat.

ODESS: Instead of dragging the carcass back to the camp,

they would strap it onto a couple of poles,

and not one, or two poles.

At this point, we're not sure whether

they're dragging a single pole

or whether they're using two poles hitched together.

JOHNSON (off-camera): Huh, so like a primitive wheelbarrow, basically, right?

ODESS: So far we, we don't have any reason to think

they had a wheel. Right.

Well, wheelbarrow with no wheel, how about that?

Yeah, right, right. (chuckles)

A barrow! Right, there you go.

Let's just call it a barrow. A barrow.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): But what could the device have looked like?

(birds flapping wings, squawking)

60 miles from the trackways is Elephant Butte Lake.

Experts think White Sands

had a similar environment during parts of the Ice Age.

Archaeologist Joe Watkins

has come here to conduct an experiment.

Joining him are fellow archaeologists Carol Ellick,

CAROL ELLICK: I'll start with the lashing on this corner,

all right? Yup.

JOHNSON: And Edward Jolie, of Lakota and Muscogee descent,

and a citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma.

EDWARD JOLIE: Is this going to be sufficiently stout,

or should we cut a thicker one?

ELLICK: I think that's pretty tiny, Ed.

JOLIE: It is.

JOHNSON: The team wants to carry out experiments

to try to reproduce the tracks at White Sands.

♪ ♪

They're building two simple structures

to see if one of them might leave

similar drag marks to those found in the desert.

Ed, if you want to

lash the end pieces together. JOLIE: Okay.

I'll grab the important piece.

JOHNSON: The first design is an A-frame structure,

based on a traditional device used by Indigenous peoples

called a travois.

They're attaching 40-pound weights

to represent a hunk of meat.

I think that's the 40 pounds.

This feels, like, more than 40 pounds, is this...?

Honestly, that's 40 pounds.

Two 15-pound weights, plus two 5-pound weights.

(chuckling)

That's...

We might have some structural issues.

(laughter) I don't remember my daughter

ever weighing this much! (laughs)

JOHNSON: Carol is going to pull each design.

Walking barefoot, like the people

who created the prints at White Sands.

It feels pretty stable.

ELLICK: It looks pretty stable. It feels,

from my end, it feels pretty good too.

ELLICK: I was going to follow the edge of the water,

is that what you were thinking?

WATKINS: I think that's a good way.

Okay. Okay.

(grunts) Whoa, getting started.

JOHNSON: Carol leaves behind clear footprints

and drag marks in the mud.

♪ ♪

WATKINS: Look at that. JOLIE: Yeah, that's great.

WATKINS: The footprints are both on one side.

I would have thought there would have been footprints

on either side and that the drag line,

would have been between the two. JOLIE: Mm-hm.

And it appears to me, as well, that what we're seeing

is that the footprints are the side opposite

the weight imbalance on the travois.

WATKINS: Either that or the fact that there are two sticks

is having an impact on the way it's moving.

JOLIE: Looks great.

JOHNSON: They record the marks for further study.

WATKINS: Let's get one up by that footprint

where the mud has pushed over to, okay?

That's a good start.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: Next, they try the second design...

a single pole with the same weight attached.

WATKINS: Do you want me to come up a little bit?

ELLICK: Pull it forward a little bit.

So... Put that end down.

JOLIE: Come up parallel to this one.

ELLICK: All right, all right.

(stick dragging)

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: This creates a single drag line with a regular wobble pattern.

That feels quite different pulling it

on the single pole rather than the double travois.

WATKINS: So it definitely is wobbling back and forth

much more than the one with the two-pole travois.

Standing and staring at them both in parallel,

it's really drawn into stark relief

Yeah. How different they are.

It's a bit of a surprise, actually. (shutter clicks)

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: But which design makes a pattern closest

to the tracks found at White Sands?

WATKINS: My impressions are that the straighter lines

at White Sands pretty much equate with

the straighter lines we're getting with the travois.

That's definitely not saying that's the only way

they could have had those straight lines.

But just based on this initial experiment,

I would be more inclined to go with the double pole.

JOHNSON: This experiment suggests how Ice Age humans

might have transported meat or other heavy objects.

But how long ago were they walking along

the ancient lakeside at White Sands?

♪ ♪

It was time to visit Denver to catch up

with Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer.

PIGATI: Yeah, right at the top of the sequence there.

So that one has a stem attached.

Still has a stem attached?

Yeah. That's awesome.

We'll go through there. Yeah.

JOHNSON: At the U.S. Geological Survey Lab,

Jeff has been analyzing the seeds they found

in the sediment layers at White Sands.

♪ ♪

He's been using radiocarbon dating

to calculate the age of the seeds, and from that,

the age of the footprints.

PIGATI: This is the carbon extraction

and graphitization system.

And, basically, what we do here is take a seed.

We combust it in oxygen.

We turn the carbon that's in the seed

into carbon dioxide.

We get rid of everything else that's in the seed...

water and other other contaminant gases

that we don't want...

and we end up with pure CO2.

♪ ♪

And we basically take that carbon dioxide,

convert it to graphite,

and that's what we actually send out to the AMS lab.

So you turn the seed into a gas and then back into a solid.

That's exactly right, we start with a solid,

we turn it into a gas, clean it up,

and then end up with a pure graphite pellet at the end.

In these little targets, right here.

That's a tiny little thing. Exactly.

It's about the size of a pencil lead, they're very small.

And they're sealed into this thing?

That's right, exactly.

I see this little closed chamber. Yeah.

JOHNSON (voiceover): The precious graphite pellets

are then sent to a mass spectrometry lab to be analyzed.

So what happens at the mass spectrometry lab?

Yeah, so that's where they measure the ratios

of the various carbon isotopes. Uh-huh.

And those are the data that we get back,

and we use those to calculate the age.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): It's the moment of truth.

After more than a year and a half,

have Kathleen and Jeff managed to find out

the age of the footprints?

So tell me, what were the dates of those footprints?

We were able to document that humans

were in White Sands National Park

between 23,000 years ago,

and about 21,000 years ago,

JOHNSON: 23,000 years ago?

That's way older than there's been good evidence

for humans in North America.

It's about 10,000 years older

than sort of the established, sort of,

thought of when humans arrived in the Americas.

JOHNSON: And you got tracks at more than one layer,

which means that wasn't just one group of people

at one moment in time. No.

That it was many groups of people over a lot of time.

SPRINGER: 2,000 years.

I mean, 2,000 years itself

is a long duration. It is.

But the fact that they were here

23,000 thousand years ago... Yeah, crazy, huh?

JOHNSON: Blows my mind, I mean...

SPRINGER: It blew our mind! (laughs)

That's like 10,000 years before Clovis.

SPRINGER: Yes.

that's like the entire length of human civilization

before Clovis.

SPRINGER: Yeah, go figure.

This is not a subtle result.

♪ ♪

(voiceover): If these dates are correct,

that would make the White Sands footprints

the earliest direct evidence of humans

ever found in North America.

PIGATI: This is the Last Glacial Maximum.

This is when the ice sheets were at their maximum,

and it's been thought that those ice sheets

blocked people from coming down into North America.

And what we found was that the people

were already here at that time.

JOHNSON: So you couldn't be blocked from getting here

if you're already here.

SPRINGER: That's right. If you're already here.

JOHNSON: And if you've been here for a couple thousand years?

SPRINGER: Right. Yeah.

JOHNSON: What did you think when you saw the results?

Holy...

(laughter)

It was pretty much like that. I mean...

There was words that were spoken

that were emphatic words. Wow. Just wow, yeah.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): But some experts question these results.

They're troubled by the lack

of additional archaeological evidence

of this ancient population.

Others say the dating method could be flawed

arguing that the sediment layers may have been disturbed.

Or the seeds may have absorbed older carbon

from surrounding groundwater,

which could skew the carbon dating.

This is an extraordinary discovery.

How confident are you

in the quality of the dates that you've achieved?

We're very confident... These, these ages,

we were able to reproduce them extremely well.

They maintain what we call stratigraphic order.

Basically, the oldest at the bottom, youngest on the top.

And even though some of these samples

were only separated by a centimeter or two of sediment,

they still maintain that order, and that's one of the,

one of the, one of the key things that we wanted to see.

And so it's not just what we see in the lab,

but it's also what we see in the field taken together

is really what makes this powerful.

JOHNSON: This is a huge discovery, how do you feel?

(laughs) Exhausted!

(laughing)

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): If the results are correct,

then these prints could have been left behind

by some of the earliest known Americans.

Back at White Sands, I was curious to find out

what Kim Charlie and Joe Watkins make of the discovery.

So now that there are dates of 23,000 years ago

with Native American footprints, how does that make you feel?

WATKINS: It's just amazing.

We talk about having always been here,

it's just remarkable to put that much of a movement

further back in time.

So now we've added another

6,000 to 8,000 years

to what archaeologists have told us was

the time depth of our history.

And so this keeps putting that history back in the news,

keeps telling people, "Well, yeah,

you've been here 500 years, we've been here for 20,000."

Here's our proof, you know?

Footprints, footprints of our ancestors.

You know, that goes to show, we were here.

We were here on this earth a very long time ago.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: But if humans were here 23,000 years ago,

how did they get here?

At that time,

the corridor between the ice sheets did not exist.

So humans might have followed the Pacific shoreline,

possibly by boat,

a route known as the "kelp highway."

But how exactly they would have made it here

during the Ice Age is still unknown.

JOHNSON: These footprints tell us that people were here

during the Last Glacial Maximum.

So how, how do you think they got here?

WATKINS: I think probably the coastal highway is the best bet.

Many old sites are going to be submerged under water now.

So I, I think that's where we need to look.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON (voiceover): Whatever the answer,

there's no doubt that these astonishing discoveries

are another step forward

in scientists' understanding of human history.

And perhaps they could also shed new light on humans' role

in the extinction of Ice Age animals.

So where does this leave us?

For many years, we thought that the Ice Age animals went extinct

about the same time that people got to North America.

Now this site is telling us something very different.

Basically what we're seeing is that humans were here

more than 10,000 years before the extinction of the animals.

So the question of was the extinction caused by climate,

or people, or both,

has just become a much more complex problem to solve.

♪ ♪

One theory is that when humans arrived on this continent,

their numbers were too small

to make a big impact on the wildlife.

But at some point, populations increased,

and they developed better hunting techniques.

Was this what eventually spelled the end for the animals?

People have always thought it was either

climate or people that caused

the extinction of the Ice Age megafauna.

What do you think?

You know, I... we really don't know yet.

But what we do see, you know, without a reasonable doubt,

is that, you know, around 12,000 years,

the area starts to dry out,

the lake dries up and then the dunes form.

So climate change might have been influencing that as well.

Maybe someday we'll, we'll find out.

We might not ever learn.

But, but you know, the exciting thing about White Sands

is there's thousands of prints to study.

So, you know, the secret might be locked there

somewhere in the sand.

♪ ♪

JOHNSON: The unique preservation

of these ancient footprints could yield more clues

about the lives of Ice Age Americans.

SPRINGER: We're very excited because it's, it's kind of

the tip of the iceberg, you know?

White Sands is still there.

Those tracks are still there.

They're eroding out every day, every minute.

And we get the opportunity to go back and, and to learn more.

JOHNSON: So the research goes on, then.

Yeah, it goes on, sure.

PIGATI: Yeah, this is just the beginning, that's exactly right.

It's a tremendous opportunity.

It... it's opening up the world of archaeology

way beyond where it's been.

It's going to give a new generation of archaeologists

something more to shoot for,

to see whether we can go back

any farther than 23,000 years,

or whether this, in and of itself, is the threshold.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

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