About 88 human ‘ghost tracks’ believed to be more than 12,000 years old have been discovered on the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake desert in Utah.
It only appears when there is the right amount of moisture and disappears when there is not.
A research team led by Cornell University has determined that the fingerprints belong to adults and children who walked in shallow water during the Ice Age, when dry landscapes were now covered with wet land The footprints were quickly filled with sand in the water, but kept intact by traces of mud underneath.
Because the sand contains more moisture than the surrounding sediment, the right amount of water will make its footprints stand out in copper soils – but disappear again as the soil dries out.
About 33% of the desert is known as Utah, the second driest state in the United States after Nevada, but thousands of years ago the area was wet and even after the last Ice Age, when the glaciers retreated . , the place was even wetter than it is now.
Climate change has turned wetlands into a wasteland, with Utah’s confined location cutting off moisture-laden ocean winds.
However, it is the changing landscape that keeps the 12,000-year-old ghost trail alive.
The researchers published a ground-penetrating radar probe on two visible tracks, providing a non-invasive way to examine the interior.
Daron Duke of the Anthropology Research Group in Far West carefully excavated a subset of the fingerprints.
Duke later said the individuals were barefoot and accompanied by young children between the ages of five and twelve.
Although the Utah site is not as old and extensive as White Sands, researchers say more may be found and they will publish a full study in the near future.
British and American archaeologists have unearthed inscriptions in the soft clay adjacent to the Alkali Plain, a dry lake in the southern region of the state.
Using radiocarbon dating of the seed layers above and below the tracks, US Geological Survey experts dated the footprints to a period of at least 2,000 years.
For decades, it was generally believed that Homo sapiens first entered North America between 13,000 and 16,000 years ago – after the melting of the North American ice sheets opened up their migration routes. Some archaeologists claim that there is reliable evidence of human habitation 16,000 years ago.
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
