Ancient Footprints Suggest Humans Lived In The Americas Earlier Than Once Thought

 

Danny Kelty

9/29/21

Core Chem Odd

Current Event 3

“Ancient Footprints Suggest Humans Lived In The Americas Earlier Than Once Thought.” The NPR [Washington DC], 24 Sept. 2021, choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/2021/09/24/1040381802/ancient-footprints-new-mexico-white-sands-humans.

            In the article, “Ancient Footprints Suggest Humans Lived In The Americas Earlier Than Once Thought” by Scott Neuman, a major discovery is uncovered by a group of scientists in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. For a long time, there has been a recurring argument over the era and time in which humans first migrated into North America, and this discovery contradicts all other findings in the past. After a team of researchers led by Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in England examined the sets of footprints, and carbon testing, they discovered that the footprints were about 21,000 - 23,000 years old, meaning that humans had migrated to North America almost 5,000 years earlier than scientists had previously been led to believe. "One of the beautiful things about footprints is that, unlike stone tools or bones, they can't be moved up or down the stratigraphy," Bennett says. This quote is important because it explores the preciseness of footprints, and the ability to research them. Because these footprints were so specific, researchers could even determine that they were the footprints of young children and teenagers. Another important thing that was mentioned in that quote was the permanentivity of a footprint, and unlike a tool, a footprint couldn’t have been moved from one country to another, letting us know that the discovery is authentic. And although many other scientists and researchers have attempted at making aggressive ideas about the real origin of migration to North America, there is little to no evidence to truly support their thinking.

            This new discovery does not only help us to understand things that happened centuries and centuries ago, but it also has a few impacts on society as we know it today. For example, now that we as a society know that people came to this continent much earlier than we had previously thought, entire new eras and time periods could be discovered in our history, like a time before the prehistoric period or something else. Also, it opens up an entire new way of thinking for scientists and researchers, on the new discoveries and artifacts that could be found from a time before we knew there were even people on this continent. But mainly, finding out that there were thousands of years more of time on this continent that no one knew about can have a huge impact on our society in the future, we may use discoveries from this new time period to unlock secrets and unknown facts about our own history that we have never known before.

One thing that I thought Scott Neuman did really well in this article was his use of actual and reliable evidence. He uses data and details that came straight out of a study done by professionals and professors of universities, and this gives the reader a sense of comfort that the information that they are reading is reliable and accurate. One thing that Scott Neuman could have done better would have been to include more information on the actual procedures and tests taken to determine the age of the footprints themselves, and the age of the people who they belong to. So one way for him to improve would to be to dig deeper and find out how exactly these researchers find these extremely precise ranges of age and history of the discovery.