Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum
Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum
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DOI：
10.1126/science.abg7586
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发表时间：
2021-09-24
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
Odess, Daniel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bennett, Matthew R.;Bustos, David;Odess, Daniel
考古学家和相关领域的研究人员长期以来一直试图了解人类对北美的殖民。关于人们何时以及如何迁移，他们起源于哪里，以及他们的到来如何影响既定的动物群和景观，仍然存在问题。在这里，我们提出的证据，从挖掘表面的白色沙滩国家公园（新墨西哥州，美国），在那里多个原位人类足迹的地层限制和括号内的种子层，产生校准放射性碳年龄之间类似的23和21万年前。这些发现证实了人类在末次冰盛期在北美的存在，增加了人类在美洲殖民的古老性的证据，并为早期居民和更新世巨型动物的共存提供了时间范围的延伸。
Archaeologists and researchers in allied fields have long sought to understand human colonization of North America. Questions remain about when and how people migrated, where they originated, and how their arrival affected the established fauna and landscape. Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between similar to 23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.