Interview with Shane Miller and Jessi Halligan on the White Sands footprints

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The discovery of 21,000-23,000-year-old human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico is one of the most exciting developments in the study of the deep past in recent years. But do these footprints hold up to real scrutiny? And if they’re real, how do they change our understanding of the first people in the Americas?

I asked two experts on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas what they thought of this incredible new evidence: Dr. Jessi Halligan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University, and Dr. Shane Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Mississippi State University. Both have extensive experience on the topic, and help us understand precisely what these footprints tell us about the human past in North and South America.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:14.7	Thanks for joining me.
0:15.8	As we've been going through this season on prehistory and the early historic period,
0:19.3	I've tried to emphasize just how fast these fields can change.
0:23.4	New interpretations of the evidence can radically shift our understanding of whole enormous chunks
0:27.7	of the human past, new tools like ancient DNA can give us whole new bodies of evidence
0:32.2	to analyze, and of course, a new find, a set of human remains, an archaeological site,
0:37.7	or maybe a set of footprints, can make us rethink a whole paradigm, a whole story about one
0:42.8	particular corner of the globe and how people came to live there.
0:46.5	If you're listening to this, you have probably heard the very widely publicized news of the
0:50.4	footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.
0:54.6	During the authors of the study published in the journal Science, these footprints belong
0:58.1	to human beings and they can be securely dated to 21 to 23,000 years ago.
1:03.7	This interpretation argues that the footprints provide firm evidence of a human presence
1:07.8	in the Americas during the last glacial maximum, pushing back the window of human occupation
1:12.4	many thousands of years.
1:14.6	If that is, the footprints are what the authors claim they are, if the dating is correct,
1:18.8	and so on.
1:20.0	To help us better understand exactly what this exciting new evidence says and how it should
1:24.2	shape our understanding of the earliest peoples in the Americas, we have not one but two
1:28.8	fantastic guests today.
1:31.1	Dr. Jesse Halligan is an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University.
	...

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