In 2006, a cluster of mysterious dark spots on a lakebed of White Sands National Park in New Mexico caught the attention of archaeologists. The shapes stroked their curiosity until they eventually excavated the site three years later. Waiting for them was one of the rarest and soon-to-be controversial discoveries in history—
The finding initially received some pushback. When the results were first revealed in 2021, concerned archaeologists wrote comments and papers challenging the results, citing the. More specifically, they criticized the study method and the decision to use radiocarbon dating on the seeds of an aquatic plant that was excavated from the same site.
The COVID pandemic delayed many of the follow-up experiments Pigati and Springer wanted to complete when investigating the site in 2020. Three years later, they finally did with two new methods that corroborate their original estimate of the footprints’ age: radiocarbon dating of pollen and luminescence dating.