![]() The more recent sets of near-simultaneous sloth and human footprints are among the oldest known records of human interactions with other species in North America, and the stories they suggest are familiar: then as now, humans and their fellow animals reacted to one another with curiosity, recklessness, and fear, coexisting in relationships often touched by violence. North and South America were the last temperate continents reached by early humans, but humans have nevertheless lived here for a very long time: in 2021 scientists studying another set of fossilized human footprints in the White Sands lake bed published an analysis of the surrounding seed layers that suggested the footprints were about 23,000 years old. In another part of the lake bed, the research team documented a set of similarly aged human prints left by a teenager or young adult who carried a child on one hip while hurrying through territory crisscrossed by sloths and mammoths. More overlapping tracks suggested that a group of adults and children had deliberately stepped into the sloth prints and followed the animal until it turned to face them, dragging its knuckles along the ground as it reared up to its full eight-foot height. Made in close succession more than 11,000 years ago, the larger belonged to a sloth the smaller belonged, unmistakably, to a human. He told the press that the oval bump in its center made it resemble a “Klingon Bird-of-Prey in negative relief.”īennett and his colleagues soon realized they were looking at not one print but two that overlapped. As Bennett uncovered the crescent-shaped tracks in the sediment, he happened upon one print even stranger than the rest. On a spring day in 2017, along the edge of an ancient lake bed in what is now White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, the paleontologist Matthew Bennett was following the fossilized tracks of a ground sloth-a bulky Ice Age animal that could weigh more than a ton and whose long, curved claws likely forced it to waddle on the sides of its feet. ![]()
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