Welcome to the Kotke Ride Home for Friday, September 24th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, ancient footprints discovered in New Mexico are shaking up what we thought we knew about when humans first arrived in the Americas.

Plus, how much plastic do we unknowingly ingest each year?

The answer is probably more than you're comfortable with,

but it also turns out that babies take in way more of it than adults.

And a new, very unauthorized website that will bring you

Chick-fil-A on a Sunday. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

20,000-year-old footprints discovered in White Sands National Park in New Mexico could mean humans came to the

Americas several thousand years earlier than previously thought, having to traverse colossal

glaciers as they went. The findings published yesterday in the journal Science could

completely upend what many thought they knew about humans' arrival

in North and South America.

Cyprian Ardellian, an archaeologist who was not involved in the study, called it, quote,

probably the biggest discovery about the peopling of America in 100 years, end quote.

First, some context from the study authors in The Conversation.

Quote, our species began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. Aside from

Antarctica, the Americas were the last continents humans reached, with the early pioneers

crossing the now-submerged Bering Land Bridge that once connected eastern Siberia to North America.

At times, throughout the Pleistocene Age, which ended 10,000 years ago,

large ice sheets covered much of Europe and North America.

The water locked in these ice sheets lowered the sea level,

allowing people to walk the bridge from Asia through the Arctic to Alaska,

but during the peak of the

...