Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Evidence of Humans In America 13,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new U of A study | University of Arizona News

Fig. 3. Alkali Flat east escarpment.
(A) WHSA Locality 2 (view east) (Fig. 2B) with exposure of alluvial beds and palustrine beds along the escarpment. Stratum 1 is exposed in the foreground (comprising the eastern margin of Alkali Flat), but in this photo, it is dried out and covered with a thin sheet of eolian gypsum sand. The finely bedded sands and muds of Stratum 2A comprise the low escarpment in the middle ground, expressed by the thin, horizontal ledges formed by differential weathering of the stream beds. The trench exposing human tracks in Stratum 2A is at the left.

Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

Fig. 1. Field area setting.
The northern Tularosa Basin showing the area of the White Sands (“Gypsum Sand Dunes”), the Alkali Fat deflation basin, modern Lake Lucero, and present-day Lost River, which drains southwest across the distal piedmont until it is buried by the gypsum dunes (see also fig. S4). The 1204-m contour line approximates the proposed extent of paleolake Otero (15). It was likely more extensive given the >4 m of lake beds at “G.” The two field areas (red dots) are as follows: “G” is the area of Gypsum Overlook, the Central study area, and WHSA Locality 2; “Loc 1” is a stratigraphic section along the west margin of Alkali Flat. The brown pattern at G is the area of exposures of deposits linked to paleolake Otero and overlain by truncated Holocene dunes (31). The inset shows the location of the White Sands and the Tularosa Basin within New Mexico [based on figure 1 in (31)].

Image credit: X. Gong and A. Cowart, University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab.
Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

The Bronze Age Middle Eastern authors of the Bible clearly knew little of the world beyond a few days' walk from their homes in the Canaanite Hills. The world they described — and the stories they invented to fill the vast gaps in their knowledge — contained nothing unfamiliar to them. They had no way of knowing the true age of the Earth or the Universe, which they imagined to be fixed and immobile. They knew nothing of the history of living or extinct species, nor of the compelling evidence for common ancestry stretching back hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions, of years. And they were entirely unaware of the existence of other peoples living in distant lands, across vast oceans on other continents.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they got so much wrong, and that their writings omitted nearly everything science has since revealed about human origins. We now know that Homo sapiens diversified from archaic ancestors in Africa and gradually spread across the globe—migrating over land bridges now submerged by rising sea levels and eventually reaching the Americas.

Almost all of this is well-established in modern science, with the only significant uncertainty remaining around the precise timing of the first human colonisation of the Americas from Siberia. Bible literalists attempt to sidestep this discrepancy between the scientific evidence and the biblical narrative by postulating, without any supporting evidence, that the Bible was authored by an omniscient creator god. They argue that any contradiction with scientific findings must be due to mistaken interpretation, not error in the Bible. In essence, their reasoning runs: “The Bible was written by an all-knowing god because the Bible says so—therefore, any conflicting evidence must be wrong.” Instead of critically examining the claims of Bronze Age hill farmers, they demand that science must bend to fit ancient, unsubstantiated assertions.

One striking example of the scientific evidence at odds with biblical literalism is the recent confirmation that human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, are 23,000 years old—some 13,000 years older than biblical literalists believe the Earth itself to be.

These footprints were discovered in 2021 and initially dated to 23,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier than the previously accepted earliest human presence in the Americas. While this early date was controversial, a team led by Professor Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences has now re-evaluated the evidence and confirmed the original finding.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in Science, with an explanation in an official University of Arizona news release.

What information do you have on the geology of White Sands and how the footprints were dated? The geology of White Sands National Park in New Mexico and the dating of the human footprints found there are both crucial to understanding the significance of this discovery. Here's an overview of both aspects, with references to current scientific understanding and methods.

Geology of White Sands National Park

White Sands National Park is located in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico, a closed intermontane basin surrounded by mountain ranges, including the San Andres and Sacramento Mountains. The park is best known for its extensive gypsum dune field—the largest of its kind in the world.

Key Geological Features:

Gypsum Sand Dunes: Unlike typical quartz-based desert sand, White Sands' dunes are composed of gypsum (calcium sulphate dihydrate), which is rare because gypsum is water-soluble. The dunes formed from the evaporation of ancient lake beds.
Lake Otero: During the late Pleistocene (roughly 50,000–10,000 years ago), much of the Tularosa Basin was covered by a large pluvial lake known as Lake Otero. As the climate warmed and dried, the lake evaporated, leaving behind playa lakes and the gypsum deposits that formed the dunes.
Playa Surface: The fossilised footprints were discovered in a now-dry lakebed (or playa) at the edge of the former Lake Otero, where fine sediments accumulated in shallow water or wet, marshy conditions.

Dating the Footprints

The footprints at White Sands were first published as being around 23,000 years old in a 2021 Science paper. This date pushed back the known human presence in the Americas by around 10,000 years. However, because this contradicted prevailing models of human migration, the date was initially met with some scepticism.

Dating Methodology:

Stratigraphic Context:

The footprints are preserved in layered silts and clays from the ancient lake margins, with interspersed layers of seeds and other organic material.
They occur in multiple layers, with human, megafaunal (e.g. mammoth, giant sloth), and bird tracks intermingled—indicating contemporaneous activity.

Radiocarbon Dating of Seeds:

The original 2021 study dated Ruppia cirrhosa (ditchgrass) seeds found directly above and below the footprint layers using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating.
The dated seeds produced an age range of 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, placing the footprints securely in the Last Glacial Maximum.

Controversy and Reassessment:

Critics questioned whether the seeds could have absorbed ancient carbon from the lakebed (a “reservoir effect”), potentially making them appear older than they were.
In 2023–2024, the research team conducted independent dating using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time mineral grains were exposed to sunlight.
They also used radiocarbon dating of terrestrial plant macrofossils (e.g. wood, not aquatic plants) as a control.

New Confirmation (2024):

The reassessment confirmed the original dates. The team concluded the footprints were indeed around 23,000 years old, strengthening the case for an early human presence in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Key Sources:

Bennett, M. R. et al. (2021). Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. Science, 373(6562), 1528–1531. DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586.
Urban, T. M. et al. (2024). Independent age verification of human footprints from White Sands, New Mexico. Science Advances, 10(26), eadv4951. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv4951.

Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new U of A study
Vance Holliday jumped at the invitation to go do geology at New Mexico's White Sands. The landscape, just west of Alamogordo, looks surreal – endless, rolling dunes of fine beige gypsum, left behind by ancient seas. It's one of the most unique geologic features in the world.

But a national park protects much of the area's natural resources, and the U.S. Army uses an adjacent swath as a missile range, making research at White Sands impossible much of the time. So it was an easy call for Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist and geologist, to accept an invitation in 2012 to do research in the park. While he was there, he asked, skeptically, if he could look at a site on the missile range.

Well, next thing I know, there we were on the missile range.

Professor Vance T. Holliday, first author.
Department of Anthropology & Geosciences
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.

Holliday and a graduate student spent several days examining geologic layers in trenches, dug by previous researchers, to piece together a timeline for the area. They had no idea that, about 100 yards away, were footprints, preserved in ancient clay and buried under gypsum, that would help spark a wholly new theory about when humans arrived in the Americas.

Researchers from Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom and the U.S. National Park Service excavated those footprints in 2019 and published their paper in 2021. Holliday did not participate in the excavation but became a co-author after some of his 2012 data helped date the footprints.

The tracks showed human activity in the area occurred between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago – a timeline that would upend anthropologists' understanding of when cultures developed in North America. It would make the prints about 10,000 years older than remains found 90 years ago at a site near Clovis, New Mexico, which gave its name to an artifact assemblage long understood by archaeologists to represent the earliest known culture in North America. Critics have spent the last four years questioning the 2021 findings, largely arguing that the ancient seeds and pollen in the soil used to date the footprints were unreliable markers.

Now, Holliday leads a new study that supports the 2021 findings – this time relying on ancient mud to radiocarbon date the footprints, not seeds and pollen, and an independent lab to make the analysis. The paper was published today in the journal Science Advances.

Specifically, the new paper finds that the mud is between 20,700 and 22,400 years old – which correlates with the original finding that the footprints are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. The new study now marks the third type of material – mud in addition to seeds and pollen – used to date the footprints, and by three different labs. Two separate research groups now have a total of 55 consistent radiocarbon dates.

It's a remarkably consistent record. You get to the point where it's really hard to explain all this away. As I say in the paper, it would be serendipity in the extreme to have all these dates giving you a consistent picture that's in error.

Professor Vance T. Holliday.

Holliday [is] a professor emeritus in the School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences who has studied the "peopling of the Americas" for nearly 50 years, focusing largely on the Great Plains and the Southwest.

Millennia ago, White Sands was a series of lakes that eventually dried up. Wind erosion piled the gypsum into the dunes that define the area today. The footprints were excavated in the beds of a stream that flowed into one such ancient lake.
The wind erosion destroyed part of the story, so that part is just gone. The rest is buried under the world's biggest pile of gypsum sand.

Professor Vance T. Holliday.

For the latest study, Holliday and Jason Windingstad, a doctoral candidate in environmental science, returned to White Sands in 2022 and 2023 and dug a new series of trenches for a closer look at the geology of the lake beds. Windingstad had worked at White Sands as a consulting geoarchaeologist for other research teams when he agreed to join Holliday's study.

It's a strange feeling when you go out there and look at the footprints and see them in person. You realize that it basically contradicts everything that you've been taught about the peopling of North America.

Jason D. Windingstad, co-author.
Department of Environmental Science
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.

Holliday acknowledges that the new study doesn't address a question he's heard from critics since 2021: Why are there no signs of artifacts or settlements left behind by those who made the footprints?

It's a fair question, Holliday and Windingstad said, and Holliday still does not have a peer-reviewed answer. Some of the footprints uncovered for the 2021 study were part of trackways that would have taken just a few seconds to walk, Holliday estimates. It's perfectly reasonable, he said, to assume that hunter-gatherers would be careful not to leave behind any resources in such a short time frame.

These people live by their artifacts, and they were far away from where they can get replacement material. They're not just randomly dropping artifacts. It's not logical to me that you're going to see a debris field.

Professor Vance T. Holliday.

Even though he was confident in the 2021 findings to begin with, Holliday said, he's glad to have more data to support them.

TI really had no doubt from the outset because the dating we had was already consistent. We have direct data from the field – and a lot of it now./p>
Professor Vance T. Holliday.

Publication:
Vance T. Holliday et al.
Paleolake geochronology supports Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) age for human tracks at White Sands
New Mexico.Sci. Adv.11, eadv4951(2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adv4951.

Abstract
Discovery of human footprints in alluvium dated to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) at White Sands, New Mexico, was a notable step in understanding the initial peopling of the Americas, but that work was met with criticism focused on the reliability of the materials used in the radiocarbon dating (seeds of Ruppia and pollen). This paper reports on an independent study of the chronology of a previously unrecognized stratigraphic record of paleolake Otero that is directly traceable into the track-bearing alluvium. The stratigraphic data along with 26 additional radiocarbon dates on palustrine mud determined by two labs independent of the original investigations document an aggrading lake/wetland/stream record that includes the tracks and spans >23.6 thousand years to ~17.0 thousand calibrated years before present, providing another line of evidence further supporting the validity of an LGM age for the tracks.

INTRODUCTION
Dated human footprints from the White Sands area of New Mexico suggest that people were in North America by ~23,000 calibrated years before the present (cal B.P.) (1, 2). The dates from WHSA (White Sands National Park) Locality 2 (LA195628) have critical implications for the initial peopling of the Americas because the ages are concordant with the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a time when continuous ice cover from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific coasts isolated the North American continent from Asia. This suggests that people arrived on the continent sometime before the LGM, before the ice blockage. The issue of the arrival of the first Americans has long been contentious and the record from the White Sands locality generated considerable debate focused on the validity of the dating (3–12). This paper presents the results of an independent stratigraphic study with new associated dates, largely from a third source of radiocarbon that supports the initial dating and places the human tracks in a broader Late Pleistocene chronological and paleolandscape context.

The search for archaeological sites left by the earliest occupants of North America includes strategies used in most archaeological surveys, focused on settings attractive to foragers. Pleistocene lakes and associated biological resources in western and southwestern North America must have attracted foragers, but archaeologists have surveyed few paleolake basins. There are no other LGM sites and only a few reports of later Pleistocene sites and none directly associated with an active lake system. WHSA Locality 2 is an archaeological site consisting of multiple, stratified human tracks and trackways found in stratified, low-energy, alluvial, and lake-margin deposits on the eastern side of paleolake Otero in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico (1, 2). The broader setting of the site was poorly known at the time of the initial research and publication on the human tracks. Critics (12) comment that “Given the integral relationship between the age(s) of the footprints and the geochronology of Lake Otero, a clear understanding of lake history is required.”

This paper describes the geochronology of a previously unrecognized lacustrine and palustrine stratigraphic record on the eastern side of the paleolake. This record continues into the archaeological site and directly addresses the paleolake stratigraphy and chronology along with its relationship with the geochronology of the track-bearing alluvium. A dated lake-wetland-alluvial record also informs on the broader paleoenvironmental record of the Tularosa Basin.

Vance T. Holliday et al.
Paleolake geochronology supports Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) age for human tracks at White Sands
New Mexico.Sci. Adv.11, eadv4951(2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adv4951.

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Discoveries like the White Sands footprints are not made with the intention of challenging religious belief or discrediting sacred texts. They are simply the result of applying rigorous scientific methods to understand the past. Yet, almost without exception, such findings inadvertently undermine creationist claims—particularly those rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The footprints tell a story that directly contradicts the idea of a young Earth created just a few thousand years ago. They provide solid, independently verified evidence that *Homo sapiens* was already thriving in the Americas 23,000 years ago—long before the supposed date of the Biblical Flood, the Garden of Eden, or even the creation of the world according to literalist chronologies. This is not speculation or interpretation; it is data, drawn from the earth itself, subjected to peer-reviewed scrutiny and confirmed by multiple lines of evidence.

Like so many other scientific findings—from radiometric dating of rocks, to the fossil record, to genomic evidence for common ancestry—this discovery stands as yet another quiet but devastating blow to the central tenets of young-Earth creationism. It doesn’t need to shout its significance. The evidence speaks for itself. And what it says, again and again, is that reality bears no resemblance to the myths imagined by Bronze Age hill tribes. Instead, it reveals a far older, deeper, and more fascinating human story—one that continues to unfold not in scripture, but in the strata beneath our feet.

Creationism is not a problem for science, but science is a major headache for creationism.

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