All language subtitles for Human.2025.S01E04.Discovering.the.Americas.1080p.iP.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-playWEB

For 270,000 years,
our species, Homo sapiens,

lived in a world inhabited
by other types of human.

We hunted and foraged for food,

alongside many
of our human relatives.

But one by one,
we out-survived them...

..and spread across the planet
as small bands of nomads...

..until we'd reached
almost every corner of the globe.

But a great landmass
still evaded us.

The Americas.

As we entered this new world,
we would face ferocious predators...

..and towering giants.

MAMMOTHS BELLOW

But how we took on
these challenges...

..and the ways
we began to tame nature

in our journey
through the Americas...

..would set us on a path
to how we live today.

It's a chapter of our story

that begins in one of the coldest
and most dangerous times

humans have ever known.

At the height of the last Ice Age,

a time when sea levels
were lower than today,

people were spreading
from East Asia

into a place
that no longer exists.

A vast land bridge called Beringia.

WIND HOWLS

And in this frozen north,

small groups of travellers
dispersed ever eastward...

..and found themselves
stepping into a new land.

If you were asked to
conjure up in your mind

a world that was magical,
that was pristine, that was primal,

you'd imagine something like this.

The northwest coast of America
absolutely takes your breath away.

We don't exactly know when humans
first arrived in North America...

..but many archaeologists believe

it was sometime
around 20,000 years ago.

A time when this would have been
a challenging place to live.

They were here at one of the coldest
moments Homo sapiens had ever known.

And the landscape
would have looked so different.

There would have been
very few trees.

And, as far as the eye could see,

there would have been
barren, icy rock.

They knew how to survive

in the barren lands of Beringia
that they'd come from.

But their new environment
was different in a few crucial ways.

The northern half of this continent

was covered
in a vast, towering ice sheet.

From here in the northwest,

this wall of ice blocked routes
into the deep interior...

..largely confining people to
the ice-free land nearer the coast.

WAVES CRASH

All that's left from their time here

are footprints, stone tools,
and animal bones.

Now, we know that they sometimes
would have hunted seal,

they would have eaten fish,

they would have eaten seabirds
if they could catch them.

GULLS CRY

Only tiny fragments
of evidence remain...

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

..that hint at how they survived.

And whilst this northwest coast

offered them steady
but limited sustenance,

the strip of land
between the shore and the ice sheets

promised new opportunities
to find food...

..but also hid
unexpected new dangers.

Oof.

This is a now-extinct predator,

and it would have roamed
these parts in the northwest

when the first people
arrived in the Americas,

and they actually call it
the short-faced bear.

And there is nothing short
about this bear.

When it stood on its hind legs,

it would have been
about 11, 12 feet tall.

That's about four metres.

And so it would have
made the grizzly bear look...

..actually somewhat manageable.

And then look at these teeth,
look at these canines.

The stuff that nightmares
are made of.

And when it bumped into humans...

..it must have been
absolutely terrifying.

And just like those humans,

these bears, too,
would have been hungry.

But the early people
of the northwest

did not run from the monsters
that roamed this land.

Instead, it seems,
they went on the offensive.

Signs of their bravery remain
in caves along the Canadian coast.

Here, archaeologists sift through
the muddy layers of time...

..to find out more about the risks
these early people took to survive.

You know when people
talk about archaeology?

Yes.

At the back of a cave,
digging mud is...

..is... This is the hard stuff.

One thing that has been found

in a number of caves
on the northwest coast

is, er... spear points
in association with bear bones.

Yeah.

And these date as far back as 13,000 years.
- Mm.

So is this
one of these spear points?

This is a fragment of a spear point

that was found in a
cave not too far from here.

Yeah.

We have uncovered a bone
in the wall of this unit.

And it's, er,
20 centimetres below the surface.

And, er, so I'm going to
pull it and we'll see if it moves.

All right.

And we don't know what species it is
or what bit of bone it is?

Er, there's not enough
here to know for sure.

Yeah.

But it is a pretty big
mammal, for certain.

Oh, look at that.

- Oh, it's not ending.
- THEY CHUCKLE

Just make sure it slides out.

Ah, it's a rib,
isn't it? Is it?

It looks like a rib.
- Yeah. - Yeah.

So that could be a bear rib.

It's probably most likely
what it is, cos it's quite robust.

How amazing.

What age do you think it is?

Well, we have some other samples
from above where this bone is.

Yeah.

And they're coming back,
er, around 14,000 years old.

OK. So it's old.

So it could be the same age or older.
- Yeah.

You know, one of the most wonderful
things about archaeology

is that sometimes
you uncover something

that hasn't seen the light of day
in thousands of years.

And in this case,
well, maybe 14,000 years.

Well, we're interested in where
bears were hunted in the past.

And in the winter,

when there's... There's not
as many resources around

and people are feeling a bit hungry,

knowing where there is a bear den
is quite a valuable thing,

cos you can come up there
and dispatch the bear.

You'll have a load of meat, fur,
as well as bones.

One theory of how they hunted bears

would have meant
getting perilously close.

Essentially, a hunter would
go with a party to a cave,

smoke the bear out of the cave,

and entice that bear
to attack a single hunter.

That hunter would be armed
with a bracing spear.

A bear would come, er,
to take the hunter up in a bear hug,

- which is a common thing
that they do. - Yeah.

And the idea is a bear
would take that hunter

and cru, er... essentially
give him a good crushing.

The hunter, at the same time,
would brace the spear on the ground

and aim it at the bear's heart.

- And so essentially the bear
would take... - Oh...

..the hunter
and the spear into the bear hug,

thereby spearing itself
through the heart.

A successful bear hunt could have
meant food through the winter.

But not every hunter survived.

This is the bone cast
of the oldest adult

to have been found along this coast.
They were born 10,000 years ago.

And this individual has been
given a name - Shuka Kaa.

And there's so much
we don't know about this person.

We don't know
about their family life.

We don't know if they had children.

But the amazing thing about bones

is that they can tell a story
if you know how to read them.

We know that this individual
was a male.

We can tell that
from various features,

like the squareness here
of the chin,

like the back of the mandible,

like the angle here on the pelvis.

On a female, you would typically
expect that angle to be much wider.

And it's kind of sad

because you can also tell quite
a tragic story on the bones as well.

If you notice here -

that is a puncture wound,

and it fits quite well
with the canine of a bear.

And so we think that this individual
possibly met their demise

because they were hunting for bears.

The dangers early humans faced down
in order to survive

are hard to imagine now.

But their precarious relationship
with this unforgiving land

had begun to shift...

..thanks partly
to a surprising form of help.

WOLVES CHATTER

By hunting in packs,

wolves can bring down prey
far larger than themselves.

A person, especially on their own,
would be highly vulnerable.

Good girl. Yeah.

It's unusual to have them all
just around, hey?

OK, come on. Let's go.

Wolves are, and always have been,
wild animals.

- Shelley,
am I able to come a bit closer? - Yep.

I think the question is, how close?

It's funny,
I can feel it in my shoulders.

My shoulders are a little bit tense.

But, given time, wolves are able
to habituate to humans.

Hello.

WHISPERING: Hello.

From around 40,000 years ago,
probably in Siberia,

before humans had even reached
North America,

the threat they faced from wolves

began to transform
into something different.

Now, we're not exactly
sure of the details,

but it might have gone
something like this.

Wolves would gather
around human campsites.

Now, at first,
maybe humans were terrified.

Maybe they thought
that they wanted to eat them.

But actually, some of those wolves
weren't interested in that at all -

they were looking for scraps.

And as they were doing that,

maybe they started
fending off other predators

and protecting
our combined territory.

And because of this,
humans started tolerating

some of the least aggressive,
some of the most docile of these.

Maybe they even started
feeding them.

We were reshaping wolves
into dogs...

..and began to use them...

..to guard our camps...

..hunt prey...

..and pull sleds.

Generation after generation,

we selected the most docile animals
and reared their pups...

..driving the evolution
of a cooperative behaviour

that suited our needs.

This marked a turning point
for the human species.

Living with dogs helped us
hunt for food and survive.

It gave us
this much-needed edge over hunger,

but it also marked this profound
and completely unprecedented shift

in our relationship with nature.

Because never before
had any living thing,

whether plant or animal,
been domesticated.

This was a complete first.

Unbeknownst to us,
we were becoming curators of nature

and gaining more control
over our own fate.

But powerful forces
far beyond the control of any human

were about to open new gateways
into the North American continent.

And as people answered
the call of the interior,

far beyond the mountains
and glaciers,

they would be forced to find
entirely new ways to survive.

A fresh wave of human innovation
would be triggered

around 15,000 years ago,
when the climate began to warm.

The ice sheets and glaciers
started to retreat.

And as they did,
the last major barrier

blocking routes
into the continent fell.

The first people
to enter into the Americas

were coastal people
in the northwest,

but it's likely
that they eventually travelled

incredibly rapidly down south,
all the way to Central America

and then carried on all the way
to the tip of South America.

Because remember -
they were coastal people.

It's likely that they were using
some kind of seafaring method.

So, very early on,

some humans would have started
to enter the continent

from along this sea route.

But when the ice sheets
eventually started to retreat,

many new routes
would have opened up.

More people started travelling
into the interior of the country

and finding
these completely new landscapes.

Some of the first humans
to reach the interior

left traces here in New Mexico.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

Fossilised footprints.

Left in the muddy shore
of an ancient lake.

The people who made them

may have been part of
one of the very earliest waves

of what was to become 10,000 years
of human migration inland.

Where there is now desert,
they saw rich grasslands.

The fossilised footprints
of these continental pioneers

reveal what kind of a world
they'd stepped into.

These are the footprints
of an actual human being

who stood basically
where I'm standing.

And we think she was a female.

And if you look closely
at those footprints,

what you see is that, at times,
the footprints,

they get broader
and they slip a little in the mud.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

And that's because

she was carrying a child.

Sometimes on this hip
and sometimes on this hip.

Then at other times,
she stopped and put the child down,

and you end up
with two sets of footprints.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

And she walked
for at least a kilometre north,

and then heads back south.

I just can't think of anything
more... more human

than a mother and a child
walking together,

and a mother carrying her child.

And it's interesting,
cos this whole journey

has been us tracing the footsteps
of our ancient ancestors.

And in a moment like this,
that's actually literal.

Archaeologists are finding
more of these footprints,

left by a female or possibly an
adolescent male carrying a child,

hidden beneath
the hard, packed sand.

It's allowing us to piece together
an ever more detailed snapshot

of what happened
in the moments captured here.

Let's see if we can define
the footprint a little bit.

Yeah.

It's always scary
when you start these things.

You've got to...

..take them out.

There's a subtle difference
between the soil in the print...

It's looser, it's a little damp,
so it's going to smear a bit today,

but it will come out.

You see it so...

..so clearly.

OK. So how have you...?
So you've just traced along the...?

I've just... I've literally
just broken the surface

- with the dental pick. - Yeah.

And then this particular example

just brushes out with a
little bit of encouragement.

Yeah.

And you can see the
contrast between the white...

Yeah.

..and the fill in there.
I'm removing the...

Wow.

..the sediment
that's blown into the footprint.

So we think she was walking
quite quickly, then?

Yeah, she's walking at about 1.6,
something like, metres per second.

Wow.

And, and a comfortable, normal
sort of walk is about 1.3 to 1.5.

So she, she's moving. And this
surface is wet, it's slippy.

We do know that
this was a mission.

They were on a mission.

They were moving quickly at speed,
for whatever reason,

and the footprint, um,
tells that story.

Why that person was hurrying might
be explained by evidence nearby.

Other footprints, each one
around two feet in diameter...

..left by mammoths.

And crisscrossing the footprints
of the mother and child

are the tracks
of a giant ground sloth.

Out in the open,
with dangerous animals close by,

the mother was perhaps seeking
safety for herself and her child.

This landscape would have been
filled with mammoth and mastodon

and sabre-toothed cats -
just huge animals.

They would have dwarfed us.

The mammoth alone would stand
at about four metres high,

that's about 13 feet,
at the shoulders,

and the mastodon
were only slightly smaller.

For the humans here,
this was their new world.

The early people of the plains

would have given
these prehistoric mammals...

..a wide berth.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

But they must have realised

that those animals
also represented opportunity.

That these grazing giants
could provide them with food...

..if they could find a way
to bring them down.

We know they eventually found
a way to do this

because they left a massive clue.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

Skeletons of this megafauna.

Some clearly killed by humans.

Humans would have exploited
some megafauna,

some large land animals
on the coast,

but it was
once they hit the interior

that they saw them
on a scale like something else,

in terms of their sheer numbers,
in terms of their diversity.

But how on earth
could people hunt these giants?

BIRD CALLS

CRICKETS CHIRP

One animal still exists
which gives us a sense

of just how difficult
that would have been.

RUMBLING

HOOFBEATS RUMBLE

This beast can sprint
at up to 40mph.

The male's horns
are over two feet long.

And, 14,000 years ago,

these bison had an even bigger
prehistoric relative

roaming these parts.

WHISPERING: Absolutely incredible,
but they're also so...

..big.
They're about one tonne in size.

And the giant bison,
the one that's now extinct,

but would have been around
back then,

was up to 50... 50% bigger.

HOOFBEATS RUMBLE, BISON SNORT

It's one of those things, I think -

today, you can romanticise
the idea of these hunts

and you think about them
as some kind of,

you know,
adrenaline-filled adventure,

but it's harder to grasp that,
actually, back then,

it would have been filled
with fear and risk.

Only a powerful spear thrust
could penetrate the giants' hides...

..so hunters needed to get close.

ALARM CALL

Many hunts ended in failure.

They needed a technology upgrade.

Up until this time,

the way spear points
were attached to their shafts

was a serious weakness.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

Spear points frequently
broke on impact...

..until the design was altered.

A subtle shift at first glance,

but one that would change
everything.

This is special.

So, it's about 18 centimetres long.

It's pretty sharp.

If we look at the shape,

it's long and narrow with the
broadest point being quite low down.

Notice also this thinning here
compared to the middle.

It's thought that the shape might
help with the penetration of hide,

and it's thought that this
might help

with reducing shattering on impact.

We call it a Clovis point,

because it was found near Clovis
in New Mexico.

The narrow base of the Clovis points

allowed them to be slotted
firmly into the spear shaft,

better absorbing the force
of impact.

From archaeological finds,

we know this new design rapidly
spread across the continent...

..and the technology continued
to develop.

Within 500 years,
these points had evolved

into more slender
and sharper forms...

..able to penetrate deeper
into prey...

..and archaeologists think
these spear points

were delivered
with such lethal force

because of another
piece of technology...

..whose use was exploding.

So this is a replica spearhead,

and it's been hafted
or attached on to a wooden shaft.

So, this would have been
quite an effective weapon,

but this is where technology
gets really interesting

because it's thought that one of the
ways that they threw these spears

is with a spear thrower.

So you'd attach it to the top here,

and then you would effectively
use it to...

..propel the spear forward.

At that velocity, you're more likely
to pierce the hide of an animal.

And to me, it's...

It's especially interesting
because what you get with this

is the ability for female hunters
to be more effective,

because suddenly it's not just about
strength, it's also about skill.

The new hunting technologies

allowed people to take down the
largest animals in their world.

Humans had become the apex
predator of the plains,

and now feasted on a glut of meat.

Our hunting prowess
was shaping society here.

This is absolutely stunning.

It's one of the most striking
spearheads I've ever seen.

It's... It's so well-crafted,
and it shines,

and it looks like
it was made of glass -

but actually, it's made of quartz,

so it's incredibly strong
and it's sharp,

and yet it doesn't have any signs
that it was actually ever used,

and that, along with the fact
that it's so beautiful,

suggests that it was ceremonial.

Now, when you've got
an everyday object

and it's made to look so...
so beautiful, and so striking,

it implies that it had become
a symbol.

We're not sure of what - perhaps
of how important hunting was,

but perhaps of a cultural identity,
perhaps of who they were.

Feasts began to bring different
communities together...

..and cement social ties.

Sharing meat fostered cooperation.

Food was fuelling a culture.

In the midst of this abundance,

it must have felt
as if it would go on forever.

But their world was changing.

The end of the Ice Age

that had gifted them
this warm world of plenty

was now beginning to have an effect
they could not have foreseen.

It's thought that melting ice at
the poles disrupted ocean currents.

Temperatures in
the northern hemisphere

rapidly cooled by several degrees.

Across North America,

the vegetation had begun to alter
in unpredictable ways.

In some areas, trees and shrubs

began to replace
grassland and tundra.

SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS

Woolly mammoths could not
effectively chew or digest

these woodier plants...

..and as their environment
transformed...

..the giant herbivores dwindled.

Over the space of just
a few hundred years,

three-quarters of the large
animal species in North America

became extinct, vanishing forever.

I imagine it must have been a shock
for the early people here

to witness the megafauna
disappearing,

because that's what
they would have seen -

and they're such a part of
your culture and your diet

and your lifestyle,
and suddenly they're not.

That... That must have been
quite difficult to comprehend.

Now, the main cause of
the giant megafaunal extinction

is climate change, but it's likely
that human hunting played a role,

that it was this final nail
in the coffin -

and so, perhaps unknowingly, we
humans tipped the balance of nature.

The once bountiful land of giants

had become a pile of bones.

All the hunting technology
in the world

could do nothing to
reverse this catastrophe.

The people here were plunged back
to a time before the feasts.

With these animals gone,
how would they now find enough food?

A clue lies in ancient holes
carved in the rock.

People needed to branch out

and exploit every part
of the food chain,

all the way through to something you
probably don't think of as food -

and that's acorns.

Now, these are incredibly bitter
because they're full of tannic acid,

and to get rid of some of that,

what they would do is they would
firstly get rid of the shells,

and then they would
grind the nuts up

with water in the hopes of getting
rid of some of that bitterness.

And... honestly,
acorns sound disgusting

and they taste disgusting.

They're still incredibly bitter -

and yet it's likely that the flour
from these and the paste from these

were some of the earliest
processed plant food.

We actually have some
of the grinding stones

preserved in
the archaeological record -

and if you look at all this,
it seems so clever,

it seems so inventive,

and yet it's a lot of effort
to go to

for what are essentially
some really unpleasant calories.

If you were starving,
no question you'd do this...

..and with the loss of
the megafauna,

people's survival now hinged
on smaller game

and foraging for plants.

But there had to be another way.

The solution people came up with
in the Americas

would be found in tropical forests
to the south.

This place, it has...

It has real challenges.

There are plants -
so many of them look edible,

and yet some of them
are definitely poisonous.

It requires a process of trial
and error to find the actual food.

It was in a forest, archaeologists
think in present-day Mexico,

that a momentous change took place -

and it began with
the simplest of actions.

Every so often, someone would have
come across a plant

that was safe to eat,

and would have sought out
more of it.

An example of this
is this grass called teosinte.

Now the seeds are
incredibly small and hard,

but they can be ground up
into an edible flour.

So, that same ingenuity
that humans brought to acorns,

they were now bringing
to this grass.

Where people found teosinte growing,

they encouraged it
by weeding out other plants...

..and collected the seeds for food.

This may have continued
for centuries...

..until one individual would have
become the first person

in the Americas to do something
completely original

with a teosinte seed.

There is something so magical about
planting a seed, watering it,

and hoping that it sprouts

and becomes a tiny little
delicate green shoot.

And there would have been somebody

who planted the very,
very first seed...

..and they would have -
they would have known

that it would require
effort and care

and protection from herbivores

if it was to ever become
something big enough

to feed their families with.

And anybody who's ever had
an allotment, or a garden,

or a balcony knows how much care
and commitment goes into it.

This was an idea
whose time had come.

Because humans all over the planet
started to plant seeds

and grow them for food...

..and it was an experiment
that began to pay off.

Because across the world,
the people who did this

were creating a more dependable way
of feeding their families,

and so triggered a pivotal moment
for our species.

In different places
all over the Earth,

humans were inventing farming.

Probably first
around 10,000 years ago,

in the Fertile Crescent
of the Middle East,

where we domesticated wheat...

..then rice in China...

..sugar cane in present-day
New Guinea.

Farming emerged independently

in separate locations
across the globe...

..Central and South America
among the first.

Here, people created
what would become

one of the three most important
staple crops

for feeding the world...

..because as the early farmers
planted and harvested teosinte...

..they began to shape it
into a new kind of plant.

Every so often, a genetic mutation
would arise in teosinte

that would actually be
quite beneficial for humans -

that would give rise to, say,
larger seeds,

or more seeds, or sweeter seeds -

and, perhaps most important of all,

would get rid of the hard
seed covering,

and humans started selecting
for these better varieties,

and over thousands of years,
they created something new,

that looked very different
from teosinte -

because they created maize.

It was no longer a wild plant.

It was now a domesticated crop.

The invention of farming
was to set in motion a change

that would go far beyond
how we fed ourselves.

The clue is in that word, "plant" -
to be put down in one place -

and just like the plants
that they grew,

those early farmers
would have had to have adopted

a very similar lifestyle.

Because you couldn't
exactly keep moving

if you had to tend to your crops,

and so, for the very first time
since the birth of Homo sapiens,

we were no longer
a completely nomadic species.

More and more of us were
quite literally putting down roots.

Farming supercharged our capacity
to fuel human activity...

..and what emerged
was extraordinary.

Here in South America,

there's a place where they began
a new way of living

on an unprecedented scale.

The stepped pyramids of Caral were
once lost under the desert sand.

Archaeologists are now uncovering
a vast complex of structures.

And what made it possible to build
these extraordinary edifices...

..were the fields of crops
that surrounded them.

Caral became an immense hub
for trading food.

It represented a new path
humans could take

towards permanence and stability...

..but for our species
to choose that path

was not a foregone conclusion.

I just can't help but think,

what would it have been like

for people visiting it
for the first time back then?

Because they would have never
seen a city before.

It must have been so alien to them.

It must have looked like a place
from a different world.

This was a commitment
to a static way of life -

and yet we don't consider
how tumultuous

the process might have been,

how much social upheaval
might have been involved -

because for those who chose
to lead this life,

it must have come with
a huge cultural shift,

because humans were becoming
an urban species

for the very first time.

Humans across the planet
stood at a fork in the road.

For almost 300,000 years,

we had survived as nomadic
hunter-gatherers...

..but settled lives as farmers

promised a more reliable way
to feed ourselves

and plan for the future.

The choice most of our species took

would bring dilemmas and dangers
we could never have imagined.

In the final chapter
of our Human story,

we begin to live together
in ever larger numbers -

but open a Pandora's box...

..of death and chaos...

..as we seek ways to harness
human knowledge

on our path to the modern world.

In this episode, we filmed at
a place I'd long dreamt of visiting.

White Sands in New Mexico.

Underneath the surface of the desert
are sets of fossilised footprints.

They've become the subject of
some of the most ground-breaking

but also most hotly debated
research in archaeology.

In 2018, the discovery
of the double footprints,

possibly a mother and child,

revealed vivid details about
who the early people here were...

..and what animals roamed
alongside them.

When we first started seeing
the human prints

walking alongside a mammoth print,

when I'd first seen it, I was like,
"Uh, that's not possible,"

but it takes a while
to understand what you see,

and then you go back
and you start to understand them.

But the prints themselves
were just the start -

because, in 2021,
new research on their age

sent shock waves through
the scientific world.

There's been a lot of ideas
when people got to the Americas.

Some of the main theories
is there's a large ice sheet

and people weren't really able
to enter this area

until about 14,000 years ago,
until that ice sheet melted.

When humans first arrived
in North America,

an ice sheet covered
the northern half of the continent.

If no humans had been able to
penetrate the interior

until it had melted,

then the oldest the footprints could
possibly be is around 14,000 years -

but the dating of the footprints

seemed to overturn
that conventional view.

We put in a trench at the edge
of the lakeshore

and we're finding prints

that were dated above
and below the prints,

so we can see the soil chronology.

The footprints themselves
can't be carbon dated -

but fossilised plant seeds

trapped in the mud
near the footprints can be,

and carbon dating of seeds

in the layers above and below
these footprints were explosive.

So, we don't know exactly
how old they are,

but we're looking at
the lake sediments,

and what we see is there's at least
11 different layers right now,

and those range from the top
of the sediment to the bottom,

from 21,000 to 23,000 years old.

The dating research suggested
the footprints

went as far back
as 23,000 years ago.

If true, it would mean humans
had set foot in North America

thousands of years earlier than
many scientists had long believed.

So, at White Sands
we see people here

before the last glacier maximum,

before there was these
last ice sheets,

people were already here.

The very early dates
are controversial.

Further research will be needed

to confirm how old the White Sands
footprints truly are.

If they date to before the melting
of the ice sheets,

did those pioneers
travel around the ice?

Despite the debate,

the footprints remain one of the
most important archaeological finds

of recent history,

with huge significance
for the entire question

of when humans first set foot
in the Americas.