While most White Sands National Park tours will focus on the unique gypsum dunes, there’s more to the park than just its iconic bright white sand. White Sands is also home to the world’s largest collection of fossilized Ice Age footprints, making it an important paleo logical site as well as a great vacation destination.
Tens of thousands of years ago, during the Ice Age, the place now called White Sands looked a lot more like the grasslands of the Midwest than modern-day New Mexico. It was covered with grass and other vegetation, and an enormous body of water called Lake Otero sat in the middle of the basin. At the time, Lake Otero was one of the largest lakes in the American Southwest, and animals would come from miles around to drink from its shores—or prey on other creatures looking for water.
As the animals drank from the lake, they left footprints behind in the mud that eventually became fossilized. Researchers at White Sands have found footprints from a wide range of Ice Age animals, including mammoths, giant ground sloths, American lions, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. Most interesting, however, are the human footprints discovered at White Sands in 2009.
When the first human footprints were discovered at White Sands, researchers also found crushed plant seeds in the same mineral layer. By performing radioactive dating on the preserved seeds, they were able to get a general sense of when the footprints were left behind. What they found shocked them.
Previously, it was believed that the first human beings arrived in North America between 13,000 and 16,000 years ago, but the prints at White Sands were found to be between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. To this day, the footprints at White Sands National Park are the earliest evidence we have of human migration to North America.
To learn more, check out our White Sands National Park Self-Guided Driving Tour, or you can sign up for Action+ and gain access to over 100 tours for a single yearly price.
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