Unexpected footprints discovery could shed light on lives of North America’s earliest humans

By Rachel Fadem, CNN Research on ancient footprints has previously challenged what’s known about when people arrived in North America, and a new discovery could shed more light on the story. Scientists have found 88 fossilized prints belonging to adults and children, likely dating back 12,000 years, in shallow riverbeds on the US Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. This is only the second set of human tracks from the Ice Age to be identified in what is now the United States. Footprints record a specific type of evidence that most people cannot get from other types of archaeological or fossil records, said Kevin Hatala, paleoanthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.