By Colin Barras.
A 3D model of footprints was created from multiple photographs. It shows the prints of several prehistoric children around the marks left by a giant ground sloth.
Matthew Bennett and David Bustos.
The delight that children find when they jump in puddles has been around for a long time. A group of young people who lived at least 11,500 years ago spent a few minutes splashing in the water at an archaeological site in New Mexico. The puddles in question were formed by the deep footprints left by a giant ground sloth.
The footprints were found at White Sands National Park, a site that is rapidly gaining a reputation for its amazing archaeology. There is a dried up lake-bed 100 square kilometres in size within the park. Thousands of footprints left by humans, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and other inhabitants of prehistoric North America can be found in the playa. The tracks suggest that humans reached the Americas about 8000 years earlier than we had thought.
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