Who do those casinos really belong to? Part II

We first discussed very early habitation of the Americas in Who do those casinos really belong to??? and now there is additional evidence that humans were in the Americas 25 to 30 thousand years before the current Native Americans first crossed over the Siberian land bridge.

Footprints rewrite history of first Americans

Human footprints discovered beside an ancient Mexican lake have been dated to 40,000 years ago. If the finding survives the controversy it is bound to stir up, it means that humans must have moved into the New World at least 30,000 years earlier than previously thought.

"If true, this would completely change our view of how and when the Americas were first colonised," says Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. But like several US experts, he is reserving judgement until the dates can be independently confirmed.

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In just two days, Gonzalez and her colleagues found hundreds of human and animal footprints preserved in a layer of ash from a nearby volcano. The footprints were made along the shore of a lake and were submerged after the water level rose, preserving them under sediments.

"They are unmistakably human footprints," says team member Matthew Bennett at Bournemouth University in the UK. "They meet all the criteria that were set up after the Laetoli prints were found [in Tanzania in 1976]." The sizes suggests that about one-third of them were made by children.

Sand and shells
But when were they made? It has taken the team two years, using a panoply of high-tech dating techniques, to determine that the prints are about 40,000 years old.

The key date came from shells in the lake sediments, which the team carbon-dated to 38,000 years ago. Sand grains baked into the ash and dated using optically stimulated luminescence corroborated the finding.

Humans are thought to have left Africa for the first time 50 to 60 thousand years ago and moved into Asia and Australia. The ability to cross the Pacific Ocean would indicate a grsophisticationtician than earlier thought.