The world’s first vehicles were used some 20,000 years ago, scientists now suggest after drag marks were discovered beside human footprints in New Mexico.
The prehistoric markings were found in White Sands National Park by a team from Bournemouth University. The parallel and single-line racks were preserved in dried mud and buried by sediment, according to their findings published in Quaternary Science Advances, which added that they were likely made by a primitive transport device consisting of two wooden poles tied together. This vehicle, called a travois, was used by Indigenous people from the Americas to carry goods throughout history, but this finding implies that the technology was developed thousands of years earlier than once believed.
“We know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transport to carry their possessions as they migrated around the world, but evidence in the form of wooden vehicles has rotted away,” Matthew Bennett, a co-author of the study, told Archaeology Magazine. “These drag marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy and bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed.”
The tracks identified in New Mexico, some of which measure as long as 165 feet, were made by an X-shaped travois, while the varying size of the footprints suggest that children were in the group traveling by foot—Bennett compared the scene to a family pushing a shopping cart, minus the wheels.
To verify their discovery, Bennett and the others dragged replica travois across mudflats in Dorset, United Kingdom, as well as on the coast of Maine, in the northeastern United States. Tests confirmed that the mud tracks matched the prehistoric markings made at White Sands.
While research in the area had unearthed human footprints left some 23,000 years, scientists largely believed that of humans entered the North America continent around 15,000 years ago. The discovery of travois marks, however, has introduced the possibility that human migration began thousands of years earlier.
“Every discovery at White Sands adds to our understanding of the lives of the first people to settle in the Americas. These people were the first migrants to travel to North America, and understanding more about how they moved around is vital to telling their story,” Sally Reynolds, another co-author of the study and a paleontologist at Bournemouth University, said in a statement.