Archaeologists and researchers in allied fields have long sought to understand human colonization of North America. Questions remain about when and how people migrated, where they originated, and how their arrival affected the established fauna and landscape. Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.

中文翻译：

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末次盛冰期北美人类的证据

相关领域的考古学家和研究人员长期以来一直试图了解人类在北美的殖民化。关于人们何时以及如何迁移、他们起源于何处以及他们的到来如何影响已建立的动物群和景观的问题仍然存在。在这里，我们提供了来自白沙国家公园（美国新墨西哥州）挖掘表面的证据，其中多个原位人类足迹受到地层限制，并被种子层包围，这些种子层产生了约 23 至 21 000 年前的校准放射性碳年龄。这些发现证实了人类在末次盛冰期期间北美的存在，为人类在美洲殖民的古代提供了证据，并为早期居民和更新世巨型动物的共存提供了时间范围扩展。