Ancient travois use by some of the earliest Americans

I am really excited by a new paper describing evidence of distinctive linear trackways at White Sands National Park that show ancient people were using something like a travois up to 22,000 years ago. The work is by Matthew Bennett and collaborators, published in Quaternary Science Advances, and it includes remarkable images and scans of the tracks.

The alkali flats of White Sands National Park, in New Mexico, preserve some of the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas. That evidence comes in the form of footprints, left by ancient people who walked across the landscape surrounding Paleolake Otero at times leading up to the Last Glacial Maximum. These footprints occur in several different parts of the basin, and surveys have discovered many that tell of human groups, children and adults with fascinating interactions.

A wide array of of drag marks

In their current study, Bennett and coworkers bring attention to many linear marks that they have found in some of the areas with human footprints. These marks often run in parallel with human footprint tracks. They sometimes cut through or overprint human tracks, and some run for long distances, following human footprint trails as they make an angle. In some cases there is a single track, in others there are two parallel tracks.

In several areas, the archaeologists were able to study the profile of sediment crosscut by the linear markings. These in several cases show the deformation of underlying sediment structure beneath the linear marking, some with overspill of sediment along the edges of the linear mark. These are cases where Bennett and coworkers suggest that a substantial load was likely present to account for the force of the mark onto the sediment. In some of the markings, there are clear striations indicating the dragging of a hard and nonpliable object.

The study includes a long discussion of other possible ways that linear markings in association with human trackways might have been produced. It is fairly easy to rule out hypotheses about marks that other animals might have made, such as mammoth trunk or tusk marks. While there are mammoth tracks in the general vicinity of some of the linear markings, the markings closely parallel or are associated with the human footprints and not with mammoth footprints.

Other ideas about how humans could have made these marks are harder to eliminate. The researchers consider the idea that boats may have been involved: A boat with a keel might create a linear mark if people were walking and dragging it along, for example. Based on consideration of the kinds of boats that are known from the early American context, the authors could show that the boat explanation was unlikely for some of the sets of linear tracks, but did not feel it could be ruled out entirely. They also considered the possibility that some marks might have been made by people dragging firewood.

On the whole, Bennett and coauthors found the travois hypothesis to make the most sense of the data. The instances where two parallel markings are present correspond very well to ethnographic examples of travois that were constructed from two poles lashed together to make an X, carrying a load on crossbars. The single marks also could be explained by more of a V-shaped travois, with poles lashed near to the tail end and only one of them contacting the ground.

The team did a series of experiments to examine how consistent the travois hypothesis was with the data they observed, and also to consider the possible weight and forces involved with this transport method. In particular they found that the V-shaped travois replicated a common feature among many of the White Sands linear marks, which was the overlap and partial erasure of the footprints of the human pulling the device.

With this, the authors were able to sketch out interpretations of some of the trackways, combining multiple human footprint trails of different sizes, many made by children, with the travois marks.

“We infer that the child walked in front of the adult who in turn was dragging something that made the linear feature behind them.”—Matthew Bennett and coworkers

Age of the White Sands trackways

Footprint discoveries have been emerging from the alkali flats of White Sands National Park for some time. These provided quite a bit of fascinating evidence of interactions by ancient people, including some cases that show interactions of human groups with extinct megafaunal species like giant ground sloths.

An important advance in the evidence was provided by Bennett and coworkers in 2021 when they reported on their work from White Sands WHSA locality 2. At this locality, their excavations uncovered a series of footprint-bearing levels, overlying each other, and interbedded with clays and silts. Key evidence from these excavations included seeds from an aquatic plant known as Ruppia cirrhosa, which Bennett and coworkers could sample for radiocarbon dating. These results showed that the locality 2 footprints had been made between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago.

The locality 2 evidence is just one of the many areas with footprints, but the evidence here is especially valuable because of the excavation context and dating. Some of the travois marks described in the present study also come from this locality 2 series of layers.

After the publication of results in 2021, some scientists outside the team raised doubts about the dating of the locality 2 trackways. Their main area of criticism was the radiocarbon dating of the Ruppia seeds. In their view, seeds that had formed in water rich in carbonate might show a spuriously old radiocarbon signature due to the absorption or incorporation of carbonate from mineral instead of atmospheric sources. Researchers suggested that this “reservoir effect” might result in radiocarbon results that were older than the true date of the seeds by thousands of years. In a 2022 comment, C. Vance Haynes suggested that the footprints might be as recent as 13,000 years.

These criticisms were answered by the White Sands excavation team in various replies and commentaries. In 2023, this team in a paper led by Jeffrey Pigati presented a new series of dating results combining radiocarbon analysis of the Ruppia seeds with additional radiocarbon work on pollen samples and with OSL analysis of sediments. These approaches all yielded a consistent chronology, ordered correctly with the stratigraphic profile across layers, across a range from 23,000 to 20,000 years ago for the locality 2 trackways.

This would probably have resolved the remaining disagreement in most cases in archaeology. But the initial presence of people in the Americas has long been a contentious topic, and quite a lot of researchers have a long investment in models that posit a shorter timeline of habitation. Last year the journal PaleoAmerica published yet another exchange of views on the chronology of the earliest White Sands human footprints, again with Pigati and coworkers having the last word.

Bottom line

Personally, I was not especially surprised about the age estimated for the White Sands footprints when they appeared in 2021. This site presents early and persuasive evidence for human presence, but it's far from alone. Several other sites document early human or hominin activity in the Americas in the period before the Last Glacial Maximum. This evidence has generally been growing across the last two decades.

What is unique about the White Sands evidence is the stratification of many footprint trails in datable levels, the evocative information they provide about social groups, and the evidence for coexistence and even interaction between extinct fauna and humans on the same landscapes. Another unique aspect of the footprint trails is the absence of lithic artifacts. People walked on these surfaces, in groups, without dropping a rock.

The linear features at last provide some connection with technology. But the connection is not lithic. The use of travois tells us a great deal about the social organization and logistics of these people, and emphasize—if we needed reminding once more—that ancient people interacted with wood and other perishable materials in their lives more than with stone. Our traditional search strategies when looking for evidence of early human or hominin activities must in many cases fail because these strategies rely on stone artifacts.

That brings me to what excites me the most about the travois evidence. I expect that there are many more out there to find. A change in the search pattern is almost certainly going to yield new discoveries as we understand new ways to open our eyes.

References

Bennett, M. R., Urban, T. M., Bustos, D. F., Reynolds, S. C., Jolie, E. A., Strehlau, H. C., Odess, D., Springer, K. B., & Pigati, J. S. (2025). The ichnology of White Sands (New Mexico): Linear traces and human footprints, evidence of transport technology? Quaternary Science Advances, 17, 100274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qsa.2025.100274

Bennett, M. R., Bustos, D., Pigati, J. S., Springer, K. B., Urban, T. M., Holliday, V. T., Reynolds, S. C., Budka, M., Honke, J. S., Hudson, A. M., Fenerty, B., Connelly, C., Martinez, P. J., Santucci, V. L., & Odess, D. (2021). Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. Science, 373(6562), 1528–1531. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg7586

Bennett, M. R., Bustos, D., Odess, D., Urban, T. M., Lallensack, J. N., Budka, M., Santucci, V. L., Martinez, P., Wiseman, A. L. A., & Reynolds, S. C. (2020). Walking in mud: Remarkable Pleistocene human trackways from White Sands National Park (New Mexico). Quaternary Science Reviews, 249, 106610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106610

Bustos, D., Santucci, V. L., Odess, D., Martinez, P. J., & Connelly, C. J. (2024). Incredible discoveries and devastation of paleontological resources in a changing world preserved at White Sands National Park. Parks Stewardship Forum, 40(1), 69–79.

Haynes, C. V. (2022). Evidence for Humans at White Sands National Park during the Last Glacial Maximum Could Actually be for Clovis People ∼13,000 Years Ago. PaleoAmerica, 8(2), 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2022.2039861

Madsen, D. B., Davis, L. G., Rhode, D., & Oviatt, C. G. (2022). Comment on “Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.” Science, 375(6577), eabm4678. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm4678

Pigati, J. S., Springer, K. B., Honke, J. S., Wahl, D., Champagne, M. R., Zimmerman, S. R. H., Gray, H. J., Santucci, V. L., Odess, D., Bustos, D., & Bennett, M. R. (2023). Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. Science, 382(6666), 73–75. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh5007

Pigati, J. S., Springer, K. B., Gray, H. J., Bennett, M. R., & Bustos, D. (2024). The Geochronology of White Sands Locality 2 is Resolved. PaleoAmerica, 10(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2024.2376298

Rhode, D., Neudorf, C. M., Rachal, D., Davis, L. G., Madsen, D. B., & Dello-Russo, R. (2024). Unresolved: Persistent Problems with the White Sands Locality 2 Geochronology. PaleoAmerica, 10(1), 10–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2024.2345979

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