By Staff Writer Trev Dowling
If you’re looking for something to do on a day off and don’t mind a long drive, White Sands National Monument is an ideal destination for a fun and educational experience. The park is named for its glistening white gypsum sands, a rarity in the world’s deserts. But beneath them, entombed in rocks and sediments of unfathomable age, are traces of the life which inhabited our world in eons past.
The area around the now dried-out Lake Otero is a hotbed of fossilized tracks dating back to the Pleistocene Epoch. Back then, an ice age was in full swing and the environment had not become a desert yet, instead consisting of a mix of grasslands and wetlands. This lush landscape hosted a number of large animals, or megafauna, which have since become extinct.
The fossilized footprints found at Lake Otero have provided monumental scientific insight. Before a series of recent discoveries in the area, it had been thought that humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than 16,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge between modern-day Russia and Alaska. However, analysis of the human footprints discovered at Lake Otero as well as radiological data from contemporary plant remains have revealed that humans had actually been inhabiting the area for 23,000 years or more.
Humans would have lived their lives as hunter-gatherers, with individuals of different ages being assigned different tasks. Adults handled the jobs which demanded skill, dexterity, and strength, while the teenagers were given simpler tasks such as carrying things. The footprints of children and teenagers are the most frequent. One series of tracks shows a mother carrying her toddler over great distances, with the toddler’s footprints occasionally appearing as she set him down and then picked him back up. There is even a series of tracks which indicate an effort by humans to track and kill a ground sloth.
The humans who lived in the area we now call White Sands would have lived alongside a variety of remarkable herbivorous megafauna. Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), much larger than the elephants of today, would have been the biggest and most powerful animals in the area. There would also have been a curious assortment of relatively smaller herbivores such as horses, bison, American camels (Camelops hesternus), and the exotic Harlan’s ground sloth (Paramylodon harlani), all of which would have made for challenging hunting.
Just as we would expect from an environment with an abundance of large herbivores, there were also a number of large predators which preyed upon them. Humans would have had to contend and compete with beasts such as the American lion (Panthera leo atrox) and the dire wolf (Canis dirus), larger and more powerful than their modern-day relatives. Humans would have done well to avoid them, as well as the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis, a fearsome predator with canine fangs longer than bananas for goring its massive prey to death.
At the end of the Ice Age, Lake Otero as well as the world at large were affected by the changing climate. Ecosystems changed, and most of the massive herbivorous megafauna which inhabited the Americas died out, followed quickly by the large and powerful predators which relied upon them for food. In the modern day, the area looks very different than it would have back in the Pleistocene, an expanse of white sand dunes rather than a lush, temperate collection of grasslands, wetlands, and lakes. There is still much to be discovered and learned from at Lake Otero, preserved in the dirt and mud ages ago and left for us to find beneath the white sands.