According to a recent study, a 15,600-year-old footprint fossil found in Southern Chile is considered to be evidence of Americas’ oldest human presence.
“We are gradually starting to find sites in South America with evidence of human presence, but it’s the oldest site in America,” quoted Karen Moreno, study lead author.
At the end of 2010 at Pilauco’s archeological center in Osorno, Chile, the 26 cm long bean-like footprint was first uncovered.
It took years for Austral University of Chile researchers to figure out their age and formation.
The researchers dated organic plant materials found in the fossil to estimate their age and produced a series of X-ray images for detailed analysis of the footprint.
They also recreated the old scene by rehydrating soil samples with different amounts of water from Pilauco, and asked three people to walk through the muddy mix.
“The results show that when walking on a saturated substratum, a human agent could easily generate a footprint morphology equivalent to the sedimentary structure,” they wrote in the April 24 study in the PLOS One journal.
“We conclude, based on the evidence, that the trackmaker may well have been a barefooted adult human,” they added.
In 2018, a dig site on Calvert Island off Canada’s southwest shoreline found 29 prehistoric human footprints dating back 13,000 years.
By then, those footprints have been confirmed in North America as the earliest known of their kind, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said in a previous report.
