Footprints in New Mexico, Oldest Sign of Humans in Americas

From the link....

The footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in White Sands National Park and date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science.


The estimated age of the footprints was first reported in Science in 2021, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates. Questions focused on whether seeds of aquatic plants used for the original dating may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake — which could, in theory, throw off radiocarbon dating by thousands of years.

The new study presents two additional lines of evidence for the older date range. It uses two entirely different materials found at the site, ancient conifer pollen and quartz grains.

The reported age of the footprints challenges the once-conventional wisdom that humans didn’t reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps about 15,000 years ago.

o_O..wow !
 

Some times I think of instances like this and just find it so incredible. Some guy or gal, 23,000 years ago or so, was walking around, with no clue that all this time later we'd be sitting in a modern world in awe of his footprints. And then here we are, looking at stuff like this excited by the discovery. In terms of the cycle of life, isn't that something else?
 
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There are problems with dating things from our past. It depends on what technology is used. Different technologies will give different dates. Hopefully, they kind of match up. Supposedly the earth is 4.5 billion years old, or could be 5, or could be 6 billion. Could a human find the Americas thousands of years before others made it? Why not? Or is it which technology is more accurate?
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Could a human find the Americas thousands of years before others made it?
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I just don't think we know anywhere near enough to support the narratives we have come to accept. I'm not sure we are even justified in claims about where people originated, and for all we know it might have been the Americas. Time is deep.

An example is the horse. Doctrine accepts that they originated in the Americas but then crossed the Bering route into Asia and beyond, dying out back "home." Yet the more we learn about Bering crossings the more we have to rule out the old Beringian theory that people crossed the other way. So if the actual ice age conditions preclude that, what about the horses going the other way? Crickets chirping! No word on the matter. "Don't look over there. Watch the birdie!"

There are other places where "the ice sheet was a mile deep" and yet more recent discoveries of the bones of clearly butchered mammoths dating to the very same time contradict that doctrine.

We have to be more careful, remembering that we only get fragments of the puzzle and then people spin theories from those. A lot of people aren't even aware that "The Big Bang" is now almost entirely discredited as a hypothesis due to the weight of new evidence that rules it out.
 
DebraMae said:
A couple of weeks there was the announcement of the finding of evidence of an almost half million year old structure in Zambia.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/africa/oldest-wooden-structure-zambia-scn/index.html
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Civilizations, empires, societies have come and gone through out history. As have cataclysmic events manufactured like war &/or technology along with nature.

Also hard to believe all mankind evolved on one continent. They have found pyramids and structures underneath the artic ice which ment the climate among other things were different centuries and centuries ago. And a race/civilization capable of engineering & construction.

On a 5 BILLION year old planet kind hard to believe most human evolution and developements occurred over 15,000 year period.
 
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dilettante said:
A lot of people aren't even aware that "The Big Bang" is now almost entirely discredited as a hypothesis due to the weight of new evidence that rules it out.
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While this is interesting, it's news to me. I've always been skeptical of the Big Bang, mostly because it's one of those things that is so foreign to our everyday experiences that it's difficult to wrap our minds around. Yet whatever we call it, something happened about 13.8 billion years ago that brought the raw material for stars and galaxies into existence. It seems to have come out of nowhere, as we can see the evidence of poorly formed star systems all come into view about the same time. From what I understand, there was probably no bang in the Big Bang. It was just a sudden expansion. Here's the first hit about upending what is the current understanding of creation that I got from google:

The James Webb Space Telescope never disproved the Big Bang. Here's how that falsehood spread.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has not disproved the Big Bang, despite an article about a pseudoscientific theory that went viral in August, and which mischaracterized quotes from an astrophysicist to create a false narrative that the Big Bang didn't happen.
 
Madagascar is what I was told when I was about 6 at a travel lecture my parent's took me to. I never forgot that. But to be fair, I think the lecturer was using the Garden of Eden as an example of beauty found in Madagascar. Well, that's kind of like Africa, which seems to be the most likely place for Eden.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
There are problems with dating things from our past. It depends on what technology is used. Different technologies will give different dates. Hopefully, they kind of match up. Supposedly the earth is 4.5 billion years old, or could be 5, or could be 6 billion. Could a human find the Americas thousands of years before others made it? Why not? Or is it which technology is more accurate?
Click to expand...

Those aren't problems, are they? It just means you should use the technique that is most accurate for whatever you're doing. As for the Earth, I perhaps think about it differently from yourself. I think it's amazing we can date the Earth at all! Big brains had to do a lot of thinking to get us to where we are today. And in the scale of things, I think they're doing a good job.

Mind you, it's important that guess work, assumption, and insinuation isn't used. What I mean is, the answers coming through the practice of science carry more weight than people just supposing stuff. If you stay within a scientific mindset, then evidence will point you in the right direction. If there is equal evidence that the Earth is 5 billion years old, then it just means we need to keep working on the problem. Not to mention, some people will never believe the date of the Earth, no matter what. Some people are convinced the Earth is only 6000 years old, for example.

I think we sometimes interpret words in a very fuzzy way. Technology to us today is computers, the cloud, fiber networks, satellites, etc. But if you go back in time, the best technology was a rock made into a blade and strapped to a piece of wood. One of the best and world changing technologies from the past was the invention of paper, the the creation of the book. Books changed everything!

A scientific theory is simply the best explanation based on available evidence. If we get new evidence, then conclusions can change. This is perfectly normal. So, today you might read humans didn't find the America's thousands of years before. But if we find compelling evidence which disproves this - the theory changes.
 
Maybe that area of America, is where we humans started
from and not Africa, as we have been told when I was at
school.

There is something older than those footprints, from the
area, the hammer found inside a rock, in London Texas,
it was found in 1936 and is reputed to be 400 Million years
old, that is quite something, without time travel somebody
had to make the hammer.
The London Hammer – A 400 million years old intriguing Out-of-place artifact

Mike.
 
Another interesting read on this artifact comes from J. R. Cole from the National Center for Science Education. He writes:
The stone concretion is real, and it looks impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes. How could a modern artifact be stuck in Ordovician rock? The answer is that the concretion itself is not Ordovician. Minerals in solution can harden around an intrusive object dropped in a crack or simply left on the ground if the source rock (in this case, reportedly Ordovician) is chemically soluble.The confounding factor in all this, of course, is that Baugh will not release the artifact for independent testing. He has had it tested, it is claimed, but not in a transparent way.The best conclusion I can draw from this is that the artifact probably isn’t an out of place artifact.
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JustDave said:
While this is interesting, it's news to me. I've always been skeptical of the Big Bang, mostly because it's one of those things that is so foreign to our everyday experiences that it's difficult to wrap our minds around. Yet whatever we call it, something happened about 13.8 billion years ago that brought the raw material for stars and galaxies into existence. It seems to have come out of nowhere, as we can see the evidence of poorly formed star systems all come into view about the same time. From what I understand, there was probably no bang in the Big Bang. It was just a sudden expansion. Here's the first hit about upending what is the current understanding of creation that I got from google:

The James Webb Space Telescope never disproved the Big Bang. Here's how that falsehood spread.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has not disproved the Big Bang, despite an article about a pseudoscientific theory that went viral in August, and which mischaracterized quotes from an astrophysicist to create a false narrative that the Big Bang didn't happen.
Click to expand...
I can't help but notice here that the word "Theory" has been left out of the "Big Bang". Was this theory proven recently? Last time I looked it was still just a theory.
 
dilettante said:
Or a religion-based projection.
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In either case, science or religion, it is mankind trying to define things which really are simply unknowable. That is, until someone invents a time machine. Nevertheless, it is quite fun to exercise the imagination. I am intrigued by the work of Graham Hancock, Randal Carlson, and others. I like to keep an open mind and love to consider alternative opinions.
 


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