Several years ago, I posted about some footprints reportedly 35,000 to 40,000 years old, close to Lake Valsequillo in Mexico. The authors of one of the papers mentioned in that post insisted with those extremely old dates (far older than what is accepted by mainstream scholars) in a second paper on the subject, with more evidence. Let's take a look at this second paper published twenty years ago.
The second research paper is the following (notice its revealing title):
— Silvia González, David Huddart, Matthew R. Bennett, Alberto González-Huesca, (2006) Human footprints in Central Mexico older than 40,000 years, Quaternary Science Reviews,
Vol 25, 3–4, pp 201-222, ISSN 0277-3791, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2005.10.004.
This paper's abstract states that:
"... new evidence is presented in this paper, in the form of human footprints preserved in indurated volcanic ash, to suggest that Central Mexico was inhabited as early as over 40 ka BP.
Human and animal footprints have been found within the upper bedding surfaces of the Xalnene volcanic ash layer that outcrops in the Valsequillo Basin, south of Puebla, Mexico. This ash layer was produced by a subaqueous monogenetic volcano erupting within a palaeo-lake, dammed by lava within the Valsequillo Basin during the Pleistocene. The footprints were formed during low stands in lake level along the former shorelines and indicate the presence of humans, deer, canids, big felids, and probably camels and bovids. The footprints were buried by ash and lake sediments as lake levels rose and transgressed across the site. The ash has been dated to at least 40 ka BP by OSL dating of incorporated, baked lake sediments."
The human footprints are preserved in volcanic ash, which can be dated. The ash fell on the coast of a shallow lake that existed in the Valsequillo Basin (close to Puebla, Mexico — See location in Google maps. A modern dam has flooded the area).
The authors also point out that "The Valsequillo Basin is dotted with other small abandoned quarries, and in several of them it is possible to recognize more human and animal footprints in what we call the ‘Xalnene ash footprint layer’. In this paper we report the footprints found in just one small quarry close to Cerro Toluquilla... The other sites remain to be recorded and studied."
Finding human prints in Mexico dated to 40,000 years ago, predating the last Glacial Maximum is suggestive. It ties in neatly with other ancient sites of a similar age, and hint at a very early date for the peopling of America.
A paper by Morse et al. published in 2010 is highly critical of these prints, and concluded that "Using an objective statistically based methodology developed here, these controversial marks are re-examined and found to be of questionable origin, as they are inconsistent with a suite of other, known human and hominin prints. Consequently, we argue that they should be removed as evidence in the ongoing controversy surrounding the colonization of the Americas."
They compare Australopith and modern human prints with these Mexican ones (see their Fig. 1) and find that they have a "greater breadth [and] atypical distribution of footprint depths" than those. In my opinion this could be due to the fact that they belong to non-sapiens humans, for instance Denisovans (taller and sturdier than we are), which could have made different imprints.
Yet another paper disputes the age of the prints (Feinberg et al., 2009) arguing that the ash is much older: 1.3 million years old, and that "Human origin of the marks is unlikely given early Homo erectus distribution and Americas peopling evidence. Marks likely result from quarrying activities, later enhanced by weathering and erosion."
The way the authors discard a possible non-sapiens (i.e. erectus) origin for these prints based on the fact that no erectus remains have been found in the Americas and that "peopling evidence" (i.e. current understanding) places the event at not more than 25,000 years ago. They conclude as follows:
"The evidence from paleomagnetic analysis and 40Ar/39Ar dating show that the Xalnene Tuff is not 40 ka old. Instead, our data show unam-biguously that the Xalnene Tuff is 1.3 Ma. If the marks identified by González et al. (2006a) were of human origin, then they would probably belong to early Homo erectus (Antón and Swisher, 2004). This is unlikely, based on the known geographic distribution of these early hominids (Antón and Swisher, 2004) and the genetic and archaeological evidence for the peopling of the Americas (Goebel et al., 2008). The marks observed by González et al. (2006a) were found in a stone quarry and are more likely to represent marks left behind from this quarry-ing, which were later enhanced by weathering and erosion."
A final research paper argues that the age is ~40,000 years, and that the prints represent an early human site in America (Goguitchaichvili et al., 2009).
So, there are different dates (1.3 million to 40 ky) and conflicting points of view on the origin of the prints (ancient hominins or modern quarry workers). I tend to belive they are ancient, and maybe even 1.3 million years old.
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