Overview
- Researchers publishing in Science Advances on Oct. 14, 2026 used pollen, leaf wax chemistry and bacterial lipids to reconstruct a large Lake Otero and conifer forests about 24,200 years ago that gave way to oak and sagebrush over roughly two millennia.
- The same analyses place human footprints in this changing landscape more than 20,000 years ago and show people continued to visit the area as conditions swung from wetter to much drier.
- The team reports sled-like drag marks alongside tracks that they interpret as travois use and also documents footprints from later periods, including a caregiver and toddler pair dated to about 10,000 years ago.
- The footprint ages bolster the idea that people reached North America well before the roughly 13,000-year timeline popularized by older models, but the absolute dates and their wider migration implications remain contested among archaeologists.
- Authors say the site offers rare, high-resolution snapshots tying human activity to rapid local climate shifts and they plan further work to test dating methods and to explore links between regional warming events and broader ice-core climate records.