The muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth were discovered more than 11,000 years ago by young children when they were trekking through the park.
A muddy puddle is one of the most attractive things to a young person. Four children raced and splashed through the soppy sloth trackway, leaving their footprints in the playa. Evidence of a prehistoric caper can be found in the footprints of those who were there over the course of thousands of years.
The finding shows that children in North America enjoyed splashing around. Matthew Bennett, a professor of environmental and geographical sciences at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science that all kids like to play with muddy puddles.
It's possible that early humans hunted giant sloths.
Bennett has traveled to White Sands more than a dozen times in the past five years to locate and analyze footprints left by humans and megafauna. The earliest 'unequivocal evidence' of people in the Americas is what he and his colleagues have found.
Bennett plans to write about the children's and sloth's muddy prints in the coming months as a method paper to help scientists figure out how many people were present and how old they were. Bennett was able to compare the preserved, smeared footprints with modern growth data to deduce the children's ages, even though the tracks that Bennett analyzed aren't an accurate representation of the children's feet.
Bennett said that there were more than 30 footprints across the sloth trackway from children between the ages of 5 and 8.
The giant ground sloth walked through the area on all fours after leaving its trackway. The sloth prints are double prints. The rear paw came and stepped on it as it put its forepaws down. The prints are a shape of a kidneys.
Bennet said that the giant ground sloth footprints were as big as a cow and as long as a bear. It seems that the footprints were deep enough to fill with water and make the children want to play with them.
Bennett said that children's tracks are very frequently seen at White Sands and that they are similar to today's children.
He said that the children and adults in the group were looking for food. You used to take your child to work. If you had to walk across the lake bed to find an animal, you would take your child with you.
It's difficult to date footprints without studying the rock layers and finding organic matter that can be radiocarbon dated. The once-splashy children's prints were probably made between 23,000 and 11,000 years ago, based on the fact that ground sloths went extinct around 11,000 years ago.
There is more information about the footprint finding on New Scientist.
It was originally published on Live Science
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