Tagged / Matthew Bennett

Conversation article: Fossil footprints reveal what may be the oldest known handcarts – new research

Professor Matthew Bennett and Dr Sally Reynolds write for The Conversation about their research at White Sands National Park, where they have found the earliest evidence of prehistoric transport…

Fossil footprints reveal what may be the oldest known handcarts – new research

Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Bournemouth University

If you’re a parent you’ve probably tried, at some point, to navigate the supermarket with a trolley, and at least one child in tow. But our new study suggests there was an ancient equivalent, dating to 22,000 years ago. This handcart, without wheels, was used before wheeled vehicles were invented around 5,000 years ago in the Middle East.

Recently our research team discovered some remarkable fossil traces which might give a hint. These traces were found alongside some of the oldest known human footprints in the Americas at a place called White Sands in New Mexico.

In the last few years, several footprint discoveries at this site have begun to rewrite early American history – pushing back the arrival of the first people to enter this land by 8,000 years.

There is some controversy around the age (23,000 years old) of these footprints, with some researchers unhappy with our dating methods. But they provide a remarkable picture of past life on the margins of a large wetland at the end of the last ice age.

The footprints tell stories, written in mud, of how people lived, hunted and survived in this land. Footprints connect people to the past in a way that a stone tool or archaeological artefact never can. Traditional archaeology is based on the discovery of stone tools. Most people today have never made a stone tool but almost all of us will have left a footprint at some time, even if it is only on the floor of the bathroom.

Today, modern shopping trolleys can be found rusting in canals, rivers or abandoned in shrubbery. But ancient versions would have probably been of wood and simply rotted away. We know that transport technology must have existed.

Everyone has stuff to transport, but we have no record of it until written histories. At White Sands, we found drag-marks made by the ends of wooden poles while excavating for fossil footprints. Sometimes these appear as just one trace, while at other times they occur as two parallel, equidistant traces.

A pole or poles used in this fashion is called a travois. These drag-marks are preserved in dried mud that was buried by sediment and revealed by a combination of erosion and excavation. The drag-marks extend for dozens of metres before disappearing beneath overlying sediment. They clip barefoot human tracks along their length, suggesting the user dragged the travois over their own footprints as they went along.

To help interpret these features, we conducted a series of tests on mud flats both in Dorset, UK, and on the coast of Maine, US. We used different combinations of poles to recreate simple, hand-pulled travois.

In our experiments the pole-ends dragged along the mud truncate footprints in the same way as the fossil example in New Mexico. These features in the fossil examples were also always associated with lot of other human footprints travelling in a similar direction, many of which, judging by their size, were made by children.

We believe the footprints and drag-marks tell a story of the movement of resources at the edge of this former wetland. Adults pulled the simple, probably improvised travois, while a group of children tagged along to the side and behind.

The research team has benefited from the insight of the Indigenous peoples we work with at White Sands, and they interpret the marks in this way as well. We cannot discount that some of the marks may be made by dragging firewood, but this does not fit all the cases we found.

Travois are known from historical documents and accounts of Indigenous peoples and their traditions. They were more commonly associated with dogs or horses, but they were pulled by humans in our tests.

As such they represent early examples of the handcart or wheelbarrow, but without the wheel. The earliest record of a wheeled vehicle dates from Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), in 2,500BC. We think the travois were probably improvised from tent poles, firewood and spears when the need arose.

Maybe they were created to help move camp, or more likely, transport meat from a hunting-site. In the latter context the analogy with the shopping trolley comes to the fore, as does the pained expression of the adults faces as they quest for resources with a gaggle of children in tow.The Conversation

Matthew Robert Bennett, Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Associate Professor in Hominin Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Conversation article: Humans got to America 7,000 years earlier than thought, new research confirms

Professor Matthew Bennett and Dr Sally Reynolds write for The Conversation about their research dating fossil footprints found in New Mexico…

Humans got to America 7,000 years earlier than thought, new research confirms

The footprints come from a group of people of different ages.
National Park Service

Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Bournemouth University

When and how humans first settled in the Americas is a subject of considerable controversy. In the 20th century, archaeologists believed that humans reached the North American interior no earlier than around 14,000 years ago.

But our new research found something different. Our latest study supports the view that people were in America about 23,000 years ago.

The 20th century experts thought the appearance of humans had coincided with the formation of an ice-free corridor between two immense ice sheets straddling what’s now Canada and the northern US. According to this idea, the corridor, caused by melting at the end of the last Ice Age, allowed humans to trek from Alaska into the heart of North America.

Gradually, this orthodoxy crumbled. In recent decades, dates for the earliest evidence of people have crept back from 14,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago. This is still consistent with humans only reaching the Americas as the last Ice Age was ending.

In September 2021, we published a paper in Science that dated fossil footprints uncovered in New Mexico to around 23,000 years ago – the height of the last Ice Age. They were made by a group of people passing by an ancient lake near what’s now White Sands. The discovery added 7,000 years to the record of humans on the continent, rewriting American prehistory.

If humans were in America at the height of the last Ice Age, either the ice posed few barriers to their passage, or humans had been there for much longer. Perhaps they had reached the continent during an earlier period of melting.

Our conclusions were criticised, however we have now published evidence confirming the early dates.

Dating the pollen

For many people, the word pollen conjures up a summer of allergies, sneezing and misery. But fossilised pollen can be a powerful scientific tool.

In our 2021 study, we carried out radiocarbon dating on common ditch grass seeds found in sediment layers above and below where the footprints were found. Radiocarbon dating is based on how a particular form – called an isotope – of carbon (carbon-14) undergoes radioactive decay in organisms that have died within the last 50,000 years.

Some researchers claimed that the radiocarbon dates in our 2021 research were too old because they were subject to something called the “hard water” effect. Water contains carbonate salts and therefore carbon. Hard water is groundwater that has been isolated from the atmosphere for some period of time, meaning that some of its carbon-14 has already undergone radioactive decay.

Common ditch grass is an aquatic plant and the critics said seeds from this plant could have consumed old water, scrambling the dates in a way that made them seem older than they were.

It’s quite right that they raised this issue. This is the way that science should proceed, with claim and counter-claim.

How did we test our claim?

Radiocarbon dating is robust and well understood. You can date any type of organic matter in this way as long as you have enough of it. So two members of our team, Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pigati of the United States Geological Survey set out to date the pollen grains. However, pollen grains are really small, typically about 0.005 millimetres in diameter, so you need lots of them.

This posed a formidable challenge: you need thousands of them to get enough carbon to date something. In fact, you need 70,000 grains or more.

Medical science provided a remarkable solution to our conundrum. We used a technique called flow cytometry, which is more commonly used for counting and sampling individual human cells, to count and isolate fossil pollen for radiocarbon dating.

Flow cytometry uses the fluorescent properties of cells, stimulated by a laser. These cells move through a stream of liquid. Fluorescence causes a gate to open, allowing individual cells in the flow of liquid to be diverted, sampled, and concentrated.

Illustration of pollen grains.
Pollen can be a useful tool for dating evidence of human settlement.
Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock

We have pollen grains in all sediment layers between the footprints at White Sands, which allows us to date them. The key advantage of having so much pollen is that you can pick plants like pine trees that are not affected by old water. Our samples were processed to concentrate the pollen within them using flow cytometry.

After a year or more of labour intensive and expensive laboratory work, we were rewarded with dates based on pine pollen that validated the original chronology of the footprints. They also showed that old water effects were absent at this site.

The pollen also allowed us to reconstruct vegetation that was growing when people made the footprints. We got exactly the kinds of plants we would expect to have been there during the Ice Age in New Mexico.

We also used a different dating technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) as an independent check. OSL relies on the accumulation of energy within buried grains of quartz over time. This energy comes from the background radiation that’s all around us.

The more energy we find, the older we can assume the quartz grains are. This energy is released when the quartz is exposed to light, so what you are dating is the last time the quartz grains saw sunlight.

To sample the buried quartz, you drive metal tubes into the sediment and remove them carefully to avoid exposing them to light. Taking quartz grains from the centre of the tube, you expose them to light in the lab and measure the light emitted by grains. This reveals their age. The dates from OSL supported those we got using other techniques.

The humble pollen grain and some marvellous medical technology helped us confirm the dates the footprints were made, and when people reached the Americas.The Conversation

Matthew Robert Bennett, Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Associate Professor in Hominin Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.