10,000-Year-old Footprints Show Journey of Squirmy Toddler and Caregiver
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
10,000-year-old footprints show journey of squirmy toddler and caregiver:
More than 10,000 years ago on the playa of what is now New Mexico, a woman on a journey set down the toddler she was carrying on her hip, readjusted, then picked up the child and set off again.
[...] During the journey, the adult - probably a woman, though possibly an adolescent male - came in close proximity to a giant sloth and a woolly mammoth, the trackway reveals.
[...] "It's giving us these amazing snapshots in time," said Sally Reynolds, a paleontologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K. and the senior author of a new paper on the tracks published online ahead of its print publication in the December issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
[...] Excavations revealed fossilized footprints just below the loose white gypsum sand. These tracks were originally made on wet ground. As the water evaporated, it left behind the minerals dolomite and calcite, which created rocky molds of the footprints.
The tracks run north/northwest in a straight line in one direction before disappearing into the dunes. Next to them are the remains of the return south/southwest return journey, which appears to have been made by the same person, judging by the size of the footprints and the stride length.
Along the way, the adult tracks are sometimes accompanied by the footprints of a child under 3 years old. Northbound, the adult tracks are a little asymmetrical, evocative of a woman holding a child on one hip. At times, the child's footprints appear, perhaps during rest breaks when the adult put the squirmy toddler down. There are no child footprints on the return southbound journey, suggesting that perhaps the trip was taken in order to drop off the child somewhere.
Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Daniel Odess, et al. Walking in mud: Remarkable Pleistocene human trackways from White Sands National Park (New Mexico), Quaternary Science Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106610)
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