Reconstruction by Gabriel UguetoScientists have found early evidence of transport technology used by the earliest known settlers in the USA, more than twenty thousand years ago.
A research team, led by Bournemouth University, discovered a series of drag-marks, likely to have been caused by makeshift vehicles made from wooden poles, alongside ancient human footprints at White Sands National Park, New Mexico.
Previous studies by the researchers found that some footprints in the Park date back 23 thousand years, rewriting history by pushing back the date of earliest known human activity in the Americas.
“We know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transport to carry their possessions as they migrated around the world, but evidence in the form of wooden vehicles has rotted away,” said Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University who led the study. “These drag-marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy and bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed,” he added.
Drag-mark consisting of two parallel ridges.Some of the tracks the team found were made up of a single line – likely to have been created by dragging two poles joined together at one end. Other tracks consisted of two parallel lines which suggests they were made from two poles, crossed in the middle.
Vehicles made from poles attached in this way are called “travois” and are known to have been used in North American history from accounts of the Indigenous Peoples.
The lengths of tracks uncovered in this study range from two to fifty metres, having been preserved in dried mud and buried by sediment.
The fact that they occur alongside human footprints suggests that the travois were pulled by people, rather than animals. Many of the footprints around the tracks, appear to be from children, so the team believe that groups of children followed behind or were walking at the side whilst the grown-ups pulled.
Indigenous People who have been involved with the studies at White Sands National Park agreed with this conclusion.
“Many people will be familiar with pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket, moving from location to location with children hanging on. This appears to be the ancient equivalent, but without wheels,” Professor Bennett said.
To give further validation to their theories, the team assembled their own simple travois out of wooden poles which they then dragged along the mud flats of Poole Harbour in Dorset, UK and on the coast of Maine, USA.
“In our experiments, our footprints and lines in the mud from the poles had the same appearance as the fossilised examples that we found in New Mexico,” Professor Bennett explained.
Dr Sally Reynolds, from Bournemouth University added, “Every discovery that we uncover in White Sands adds to our understanding of the lives of the first people to settle in the Americas. These people were the first migrants to travel to North America and understanding more about how they moved around is vital to being able to tell their story.”
The study is published in the journal Quaternary Science Advances.
