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In 2021, 23,000-year-old human footprints, the oldest ever discovered in the Americas, rewrote the history of Paleoindians by suggesting they migrated to the continents thousands of years earlier than previously thought. A new study suggests that these early inhabitants weren’t just leaving footprints—they were traveling with transport vehicles.
Researchers from the U.S. and U.K. have discovered what may be one of the earliest signs of transportation technology: 23,000-year-old human footprints next to drag marks in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. Based on the positioning of the footprints, they suggest the drag marks were left behind by Paleoindians pulling simple vehicles shaped out of wooden poles. The researchers published their work on February 15 in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.
During the last Ice Age, modern-day Alaska and Siberia were connected by a landmass called the Bering Land Bridge, now underwater. Scholars widely agree that some of the first people in the Americas arrived from Siberia via the Bering Land Bridge. While a number of archaeologists argue that humans arrived around 15,000 years ago, recent evidence suggests they may have been present as early as 30,000 years ago.
Either way, “we know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transport to carry their possessions as they migrated around the world, but evidence in the form of wooden vehicles has rotted away,” Matthew Bennett, the lead author of the new study,” said in a university statement. “These drag-marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy and bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed,” added Bennett, an environmental and geographical scientist at Bournemouth University.
Bennett and his team discovered single and double-lined tracks, which they attribute to two different vehicle designs. Two poles tied together at one end in the shape of a V would have left a single track, while two poles shaped into an X would have left behind two tracks. Such vehicles are called “travois” and existed more recently, too: “Indigenous narratives and ethnographic literature contain references to the use of travois fashioned from one or more poles and pulled by dogs, horses, and/or humans,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The prehistoric drag marks. © Bournemouth University Given the positioning of the footprints near the tracks, the researchers suggest that the vehicles were pulled by humans. Additional footprints seem to belong to children, painting a picture of a prehistoric road trip with kids following behind adults pulling along the vehicles—potentially carrying resources or even younger children.
“Many people will be familiar with pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket, moving from location to location with children hanging on. This appears to be the ancient equivalent, but without wheels,” Bennett explained.
To test their interpretation, the researchers built travois themselves and took children for a ride along the coasts of Dorset in the U.K. and Maine in the U.S. Lo and behold, “our footprints and lines in the mud from the poles had the same appearance as the fossilised examples that we found in New Mexico,” Bennett, who specializes in ancient footprints, admitted. If Bennett and his colleagues’ interpretation proves to be true, that would make the tracks one of the oldest known pieces of evidence of transportation technology known to science.
“Every discovery that we uncover in White Sands adds to our understanding of the lives of the first people to settle in the Americas,” said Sally Reynolds, a paleontologist from Bournemouth University and co-author on the study.
Ultimately, their discovery sheds light on the earliest immigrants to a region that, tens of thousands of years later, is still a nation of immigrants.
