Ice Age footprints found in desert

FLUKE: RESEARCHERS SEE IT FROM MOVING CAR

Footprints laid down by Ice Age hunter-gatherers and recently discovered in a US desert are shedding new light on North America’s earliest human inhabitants.

Dozens of fossilised prints found in dried-up riverbeds in the western state of Utah reveal more details about how the continent’s original occupants lived more than 12 000 years ago – just as the frozen planet was starting to thaw.

The fossils could have remained unnoticed if not for a chance glance out of a moving car as researchers Daron Duke and Thomas Urban drove through Hill Air Force Base chatting about footprints.

“We were talking about what they would look like,” Duke said. “And he said: ‘Kind of like that out the window.’”

What the men had found turned out to be 88 distinct prints left by a mixture of adults and children.

“They vary between just looking like discoloured patches on the ground and... little pop-ups, little pieces of dirt around them or on them. But they look like footprints,” Duke said.

The discovery was followed by a painstaking few days of very careful digging – with Duke sometimes lying on his belly – to ensure that what they were looking at was as old as it appeared.

“What I found was bare feet of people that had stepped in what looks to be shallow water where there was a mud sub-layer,” Duke said.

“The minute they pulled their foot out, the sand infilled that and has preserved it perfectly.”

Duke, of the Nevada-based Far Western Anthropological Research Group, had been in the area looking for evidence of prehistoric campfires built by the Shoshone, a people whose descendants still live in the western United States.

He had brought Urban over from Cornell University because of his expertise in uncovering evidence of ancient humans – including the discovery of human tracks in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park that are thought to be up to 23 000 years old.

The new fossils add to a wealth of other finds from the area – including stone tools, evidence of tobacco use, bird bones and campfire remains – that are starting to provide a more complete record of the Shoshone and their continuous presence in the region beginning 13 000 years ago.

“These are the resident indigenous people of North America; this is where they lived, and this is where they still live today,” Urban said.

“Once I realised I was seeing toes,... I was just kind of awestruck by it,” he said.

88 distinct prints left by a mixture of adults and children