The White Sands Footprints

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This is Origin Stories, the Leakey Foundation podcast.

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I’m Meredith Johnson.

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For most of the past century, if you asked an archaeologist when humans first came to the Americas, they’d tell you it was around 13 or 14,000 years ago when people crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and then worked their way south through a gap between melting ice sheets.

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But new research out of the American West tells a different story, suggesting that humans have been on this continent for much, much longer.

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White Sands National Park in New Mexico has been called a natural wonder of the world.

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It’s 275 square miles of white sand.

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At first glance, it seems so subtle.

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It’s just a dune field, you think?

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David Bustos has been managing the park’s cultural and natural resources for over 20 years.

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But then you look at it differently.

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You know, White Sands is so large, you can see it from the International Space Station.

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What makes White Sands white is a soft mineral called gypsum.

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Gypsum is used in everything from toothpaste to plaster and drywall, and White Sands has the world’s largest gypsum dune field.

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One day in 2005, David was on his regular rounds inspecting the park when he noticed something unusual.

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I was checking our boundary fence for breaks and things like that.

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And I looked over and I thought, those look strange.

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It was what I thought were cowboy boot prints.

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A field of gypsum makes for a pretty odd surface.

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It can seem soft and hard at the same time.

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It can seem dry, but there’s water inside every gypsum crystal, and more just a few feet below the surface.

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The Tularosa Basin, where White Sands is located, is like a bathtub with no drain.

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So when it rains, it floods.

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At first, David didn’t think too much of the strange prints he’d found in what’s already a strange place.

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And I noticed over the years, sometimes it’d go, sometimes it’d come back, but I thought they’re cowboy prints because they had a very narrow hill, and then they’re wide at the front of the foot.

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So in my mind, I don’t know what else has a hill like that or a footprint like that.

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David showed them to some colleagues at the park, but people didn’t quite know what they were looking at.

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They brought experts in to examine the prints, but the prints that were visible could just disappear because of changes in the humidity.

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So I’d forget about it, and then we’d find more, and this kept going on and on.

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And 2009 really was the first prints that I seen that I realized these really looked like human prints.

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And right next to them was a set of mammoth prints, about 16 prints.

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You could see one right after another, and then there was human prints also.

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And they were a red clay, sort of like a mudstone.

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And they were interesting because there was no other red clay anywhere, only in the mammoth prints and the human prints.

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White Sands is famously white, so a series of red human-like footprints stuck out like a sore thumb.

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Those are the first time that I thought, OK, I really believe these human prints must be the same age as the mammoth prints.

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As David found more prints, he was also researching the history of White Sands.

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The park was created in 1933, and he learned that people had been noticing strange prints in the dunes even before then.

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The first record that I’ve seen of footprints was in 1931.

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Mr. Elias Wright was a government trapper, and he was going across the basin.

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He found these amazing footprints, and he realized that they were elongated.

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These footprints were massive.

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They were 22 inches across and 8 inches wide.

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And so he thought, well, I guess I found Bigfoot.

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So he brought out a team of experts with him to come and find them.

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And they went out.

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They never did find Bigfoot, of course.

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And then later on, they found camel and mammoth prints.

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So for years, people say, oh, no, it wasn’t Bigfoot.

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It was camel and mammoth prints that he found.

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In 2014, David was giving a presentation about some giant ground sloth tracks they’d been finding around the park.

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Afterwards, a woman came up to him, and she told him she was the grandniece of Ellis Wright, that government trapper from the 1930s.

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And she gave me a copy of the original pictures of Mr. Wright.

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And when I seen, I looked down, I started laughing because we had just seen those exact same prints that he first described.

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And what they were, if he would have brushed them out, he would have found that they were amazing giant ground sloth footprints with claws and elongated digits.

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And the ones we had were exactly the same.

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But at the time, he didn’t understand the way these prints work.

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You’re not actually seeing the print at the surface of these ones.

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They’re actually about six inches below.

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And when it gets dry or wet, then you have like a ring of evaporative salts that form on the surface.

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And that’s what he was actually looking at, was the surface print.

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At this point, everyone else’s attention was on those incredible megafauna footprints in the park.

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22 inches across, eight inches wide.

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They’re massive.

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But David was still stuck on the possibly human prints.

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If these mysterious footprints were human, who left them and when?

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And so he did bring in different people.

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And at first, some folks, they looked at, oh no, I think it’s people, a camel slipping in the mud or other explanations like that.

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And so I thought, okay, you know, I let that go.

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This kept happening.

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He’d bring in experts to look at the footprints and they’d all say the same things.

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The prints were missing features that clearly define human feet like individual toes or a heel.

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And without those defining features, you’re kind of out of luck.

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But later that year in 2014, David found it.

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A footprint that had it all.

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So we brushed him out and we found amazing toes and heel, arch, the whole thing.

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The foot was there and couldn’t believe it.

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And right next to it was also mammoth prints on that same surface as well.

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He now had what was undeniably a human footprint paired with mammoth prints.

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At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information about how to preserve and document ancient footprints, especially in gypsum, like at White Sands.

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So David reached out to Matthew Bennett, a British geologist from Bournemouth University in the UK who specializes in icknology, the study of fossilized footprints, trails and tracks.

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Matthew agreed to come out to White Sands to look at the prints.

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But to really study the tracks in depth, David needed a full team of experts to confirm the prints were truly what he thought they were.

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In 2017, he invited a group of specialists from around the world to come to White Sands and evaluate the prints he’d found.

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We were invited because Jeff and I work in national parks all over the American Southwest.

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There was whispers saying that this is a really old site and there was terror associated with that.

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And that’s why they came to us.

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That’s Kathleen Springer.

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She and Jeff Pigati are research geologists with the United States Geological Survey.

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They study desert water systems and the deposits left behind by ancient springs, lakes and wetlands.

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The idea of ancient human prints at White Sands was scary for scientists to consider because if the prints were as old as it seemed they might be, they’d be thousands of years older than any accepted evidence for people on this continent.

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And a big claim like that gets a lot of scrutiny.

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And you need to be prepared.

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So the team of specialists traveled to New Mexico, but White Sands got so much rain that weekend the park flooded.

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Everything David had invited the researchers to come see was underwater.

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And they left without seeing the prints.

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A short time later though, Matthew Bennett, the footprint expert, was able to return to White Sands.

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For David, this was another chance to show him the human prints.

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And fortunately, the conditions were much better this time.

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So he came back out and we were recording these really amazing giant ground sloth footprints.

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They were the same prints that Mr. Wright described in the 30s.

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They’d found the same prints that were first discovered by the government trapper in 1931 who thought he’d found Bigfoot.

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You can see incredible prints where they’re standing up and spinning in circles and mammoth going nearby also and camel prints also.

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But we were brushing out some of the prints.

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I was working like on a right print and Matthew was up in front of me working on a left.

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And then I heard a lot of excitement from Matthew.

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And I walked up and looked over his shoulder and was looking down and there was an incredible human print inside a giant ground sloth footprint.

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And then it happened again and again and again where human prints inside the sloth print looked like they were extending their footprint to step inside the sloth prints.

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And then other places where the sloth was stepping on top of the human print.

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This scene made it clear that the human prints were laid down at the same time as the giant Ice Age animal prints.

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We did not know the exact age.

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We just knew that they were of the Ice Age time frame before the sloth went extinct.

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That the people and the giant ground sloth were interacting with each other.

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Kathleen and Jeff, the geologists, came up with a plan to study the tracks so they could better understand the connection between the human footprints and the Ice Age megafauna prints.

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By January of 2020, the plan was in place.

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David had the team assembled.

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They just had to get back out there.

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But White Sands isn’t the easiest place to get to.

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So you have to stay at quite a small military town called Alamogordo.

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Alamogordo, if I say it properly.

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It’s a very, very small town.

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That’s Sally Reynolds, a paleoecologist and Leakey Foundation grantee from Bournemouth University.

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She’s also an expert in the study of footprints.

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And then you take the car and you drive all the way down the road about three, four, five miles.

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And there you come across the gates of the White Sands, now National Park.

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And then you get onto different vehicles.

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You have to literally park your car, get your sunscreen on.

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It gets very hot out there.

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And what people forget is it’s the sun that comes down in the sky, but it’s also the reflection back into your eyes.

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So every part of you has got to be covered.

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It gets really, really hot.

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I can’t really explain to you how strong the sun is when you’re there.

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It’s important to mention here that the footprint trackways we’re talking about are not accessible to the public.

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The park is surrounded by military installations on all sides.

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Some of the prints are in an area of the park that borders the White Sands Missile Range, an active U.S. military test range where the world’s first atomic bomb was tested in 1945.

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Despite all the plane parts and unexploded bombs, Sally says the desert landscape is stunning.

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The dune field is like this snowy landscape.

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It’s absolutely phenomenal.

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And you’ve seen pictures of it, I’m sure, because it’s sort of like this postcard environment with this beautiful dunes, and the sun is shining, and everything is tones of blue.

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There’s a little bit of brown, a little bit of green, and it’s phenomenal.

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The place where we work is not in the dunes.

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You have to travel further than the dunes into the plier itself.

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And the bit that we’re looking at there is a deflated lake bed.

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So what we are walking on is, now it’s dry and it’s very crusty.

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So when you walk on it, your feet crunch, your boots crunch beneath your feet.

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And you can feel how there’s a crust of salt, which has formed on top of the sediments of the plier.

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And when the conditions are right, you can see these footprints just suddenly becoming visible on the ground.

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The mammoth prints stick out first.

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But if you look closer, smaller footprints start to appear.

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Ice Age humans alongside and on top of the mammoth, giant sloth, American lion, dire wolf prints, and other animals that lived and moved around this ancient lake.

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The gypsum sand captures these footprints in a kind of natural plaster.

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You will go from thinking you’re standing in this empty landscape and there’s nothing there.

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And suddenly it’s like these things just pop up at you and you realize you’re standing on all of these thousands of footprints and that they go on for miles and miles and miles.

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And it’s then when you realize that the archive of white sands isn’t the sand.

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The sand is just part of the story.

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Like the pages of a book, the plier is holding layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of activity on the surface.

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Humans, megafauna, sometimes walking on the same landscape, not separated by a lot of time.

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The team’s first big task was figuring out how old the footprints were.

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But first they had to choose which prints to date.

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When we say there are thousands of prints, you know, those are thousands of prints at the ground surface today, right?

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And you can see those forever.

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But if you want to know how old something is, you can’t date a footprint at the surface, right?

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That’s geologist Jeff Pigati.

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One of the things he specializes in is developing and testing innovative methods and materials for radiocarbon dating.

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And to date these footprints, they needed to collect and date materials above, below, and on the sides of the prints.

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This would allow them to essentially create a three-dimensional sedimentary timeline of everything around the footprints to give them a date range for the footprints themselves.

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The thing about footprints is that you can’t move a footprint through the sediment.

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So in some of the other caves, they said, oh, you know, some of these older stone tools, for example, younger stone tools could have drifted down through the sediment and made it look older.

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And you can’t do that with a footprint because a footprint is so fragile that it wouldn’t move through the sediment.

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It would be destroyed.

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Since the footprints can’t move up or down without being destroyed, that makes the surrounding material a pretty reliable proxy for dating the prints.

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So now it’s January of 2020, and David and the team are at White Sands, ready to dig, ready to collect samples, and ready to date them.

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They dig a trench 11 meters long so they can collect samples from above and below the tracks.

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We discovered tiny little seeds in the footprint layers, and we found a layer below the footprints, and we found a layer above the footprints.

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And this enabled us to create a little package of carbon dateable materials with footprints in the middle.

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And that was perfect because suddenly we had enough organic material to be able to do radiocarbon dating.

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15 years after David Bustos first stumbled upon the fossilized prints at White Sands, they’re finally on the brink of determining how old these human footprints are.

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The team was assembled, the funding acquired, and the trench dug.

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They’d even collected their first round of samples.

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They had plans to go back and collect more, and then COVID hit.

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For almost two years, they couldn’t go back to the site at all.

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But fortunately, the samples they’ve collected included fossilized seed fragments from an aquatic plant called ditch grass.

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The seeds were below, above, and within the footprints, which meant they were probably as old as the footprints.

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So Jeff carbon dated the ditch grass seeds and came back with an age between 23 and 21,000 years old.

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Before this discovery, the earliest known evidence of humans in North America was around 14,000 years old.

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So these prints were really old.

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In 2021, their research was published in the journal Science, where it immediately and unsurprisingly led to controversy.

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Not only were they overturning the existing evidence on how long people had been in the Americas, but they’d used ditch grass.

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Using ditch grass to date the footprints was controversial because aquatic plants can give inconsistent carbon dates.

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So many people didn’t think the footprints could actually be as old as the dates Jeff Pagotti got back from the ditch grass seeds.

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They can give ages that are too old.

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And the reason is groundwater moves through rocks and some of those rocks have carbon in them.

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So some of that old carbon gets in the water and then gets into the tissues of the plants that are living in the water.

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Which would cause your age to be too old.

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Jeff, David, and the rest of the team knew they’d have to find other datable material besides an aquatic plant.

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But at the same time, the pandemic stopped them from going back to collect more samples.

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When they were finally able to return, they took a variety of samples so they could use a few different dating techniques, including something called luminescence dating.

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Luminescence basically dates the last time sand grains were exposed to light or heat.

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And carbon dating is based on the decay of carbon isotopes over time.

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So they’re very, very different.

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And then we also collected samples for dating of pollen.

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And this was a real big breakthrough for us because pollen, especially the kind of pollen that we were finding in the sediments was almost all conifer pollen.

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Unlike the ditch grass, conifer trees don’t live in the water.

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So they don’t have the same issue of pulling carbon from the rocks in the water.

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And conifer pollen was everywhere.

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So finding materials to sample wasn’t an issue.

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It’s the terrestrial material that was blowing around on the landscape at the time that the people were walking around.

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We actually collected samples directly from footprints themselves.

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Because the findings in the first paper were potentially so paradigm shifting, the team not only wanted a different material to date, they also wanted someone from outside who could independently date the conifer pollen.

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My research is in lakes, which are the coolest thing on the planet, I have to say.

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That’s Susan Zimmerman, a geochronologist and ancient lake expert.

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She’s a research associate at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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Initially, when I read the initial paper, I was like, yeah, they, I mean, they thought about where the water could be coming from and whether there could be a reservoir effect.

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And they really, you know, they thought through why they believed the dates, right?

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Because they didn’t have a particular horse in the race.

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They didn’t have a date in mind that they wanted these things to be.

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They just, you know, went where the data led them.

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To process the conifer pollen, Susan used a technique called cytometry.

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This was originally developed to separate different kinds of cells from one another in medical research.

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Susan used it to separate out the pollen grains.

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It involved lasers, a computer, and a whole lot of pollen.

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So basically you’re passing the grains one by one past a set of lasers and it goes, depending on what settings you’ve said, it says pollen, pollen, pollen, pollen, not pollen, not pollen, pollen, pollen, pollen.

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And so you can collect 50,000 or 100,000 grains by putting your sample in the cytometer and then going off to do something else as opposed to sitting in front of a microscope and picking by hand, which is one of the things that people tried.

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She then ran the pollen through an accelerator mass spectrometer, a giant machine that can accurately date very tiny bits of carbon.

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The dates Susan got for the conifer pollen matched Jeff’s.

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The dates also matched the team’s dates for the ditch grass.

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So what we found is that the seed samples, the seed ages, and the pollen ages, and the luminescence ages all agree with one another, which basically means that these dates are accurate.

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They published the new independent results in the journal Science in 2023.

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The new study reconfirmed the 2021 finding that humans were in New Mexico between 21 and 23,000 years ago, at least 7,000 years earlier than previously known.

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And because we’re talking about a finding that dramatically changes the timeline and history of human migration, people wanted flawless evidence.

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Some were still skeptical of the new pollen dating.

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So another team of independent researchers dated the site too.

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This study was published in 2025 in Science Advances, coming back with dates in the same range, 23,600 to 17,000 years ago.

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This opened the door all the way for a new set of questions.

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How did humans get so far south at this time?

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And what does it all mean?

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We have always thought that humans couldn’t arrive in North America before around 16,000, because there were these massive ice sheets that were in the way that were blocking humans coming down from Beringia through Alaska, down south.

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We had found evidence, really good evidence, that humans were already there.

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That’s footprint expert and Leakey grantee Sally Reynolds again.

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And that is why people were so excited about our discovery, because it literally rewrote the school textbooks about how and where we could document the first humans in North America.

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And it pushed it back about seven or 8,000 years older than we expected.

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And it then threw the cat among the pigeons, as sometimes new discoveries do, because a lot of archaeologists were very committed to the idea that the very first wave of humans who moved into North America were people belonging to the Clovis industry.

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Problem with White Sands is that it’s older than we expected to be for Clovis people.

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And secondly, we don’t have any stone tools.

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We have little bits and fragments every now and again.

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We think, oh, is this it?

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Do we have a tool?

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But actually we have nothing which resembles anything as beautiful as a Clovis point.

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This means that the humans who walked through White Sands over 20,000 years ago were a different group than the Clovis people.

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They are pre-Clovis people.

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And we are trying to learn more about this lifeway.

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We can’t particularly compare it to some of the older sites because there were multiple waves of migration into the Americas.

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And then there are a few sites over the years that have claimed to be older than Clovis.

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And some of those sites, we call them pre-Clovis sites, have been accepted by the archaeological community.

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And they basically push back the timing of the earliest arrival, maybe to 15,000 or 16,000 years ago.

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That was kind of the paradigm that existed when we started at White Sands.

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And what we found was, well, there’s actually human footprints between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, which is a giant step back in time in terms of when people would have come over.

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At this time, 23,000 to 21,000 years ago, North America was in the middle of a period known as the last glacial maximum, the coldest part of the most recent ice age.

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During this extremely cold time, much of Northern Europe, Asia, and North America were covered by ice sheets that would have blocked people from moving through present-day Canada to the United States across land.

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But the White Sands footprints show that people did find a way to move south into the present-day U.S., despite the giant ice sheets.

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Think about where we are.

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We are in south central New Mexico.

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We’re not right along the edge of the coastline of California or something like that.

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And so if people are coming down the coast, not only are they coming down the coast, but they’re fanning out into the continental U.S. And so then you have to start thinking, OK, well, how did they get here?

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And when did they get here?

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People were south of the ice sheets at the height of the last glacial maximum, and that’s been pretty difficult for some scientists to accept.

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But it’s what the data says, and we are not archaeologists or anthropologists, right?

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We are research geologists.

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We didn’t have any skin in the game whatsoever in terms of the story.

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It didn’t matter to us, you know, whether people were here 15, 16, 20, 23, 25,000 years ago.

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But what we wanted to do was get it right, no matter what.

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And so this is where the data has led us, is that people were here, you know, 23,000 years ago.

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Knowing humans were somehow here all the way in New Mexico before the ice sheets melted has allowed researchers to start questioning just how much earlier than that humans might have arrived in the Americas.

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Ed Jolie is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, where he specializes in perishable technologies, or the archaeology of things that don’t preserve that well.

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He’s also an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and an archaeologist on the White Sands Research Team.

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If you start pushing back human occupation of Americas by, you know, seven, eight, plus thousand years, and you start stretching back further in time in that chronology, then once you get beyond the last glacial maximum, it’s sort of like the gloves are out.

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How old could this be?

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Because when the glacial ice sheets were at their peak, more than a mile or mile and a half thick in certain parts of North America, that would have literally, you know, been an impenetrable barrier.

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At the thickest parts, the glacial barrier was as tall as the Golden Gate Bridge is long, almost two miles high.

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Imagine the Great Wall of Ice in the Game of Thrones, but something much larger than that.

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Now that we know humans found ways south before the giant ice walls melted, people have started to speculate just how they got there, and here are a few different possibilities.

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A.

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They got around the giant impenetrable ice wall by displaying incredible feats of physical strength and endurance.

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This one seems quite unlikely.

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B.

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They bypassed the frozen barrier by floating down the western coast from Alaska.

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Or C.

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They moved south before the ice wall formed.

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And we’re talking about it being potentially a lot earlier than just 23,000.

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I mean, we’ve got, you know, reasonable evidence of at least the presence of humans in Arctic environs in Siberia upwards of 45, close to 50,000 years ago.

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So people were there.

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Humans were there.

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Scientists had previously thought that humans couldn’t possibly have made it to the Americas until after the ice wall had melted enough to be crossed.

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With the White Sands Prince as evidence, we now know that people didn’t have to wait thousands of years for the ice to melt.

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They just had to get there before it formed.

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And so if we start talking about the removal of these barriers or talking about a time frame before those barriers were there as barriers, then it opened up a whole new range of questions about where and how we might contemplate looking for evidence of early settlements and occupations.

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Since the discovery of human footprints at White Sands, researchers have started looking for similar sites.

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But Ed Jolie thinks archaeology has a few knots to untie first, including how the discipline looks at certain kinds of evidence.

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On one level, as a Native person, it’s nice confirmation in saying we’ve been telling you.

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This is not news to a lot of people outside of archaeology.

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But it also, I think for me, is exciting because it forces people to rethink and reframe how they’ve understood the Native American settlement of the Americas.

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I would really like to see more people asking some of those questions about what has archaeology been doing wrong, that we’ve missed some of this evidence.

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And I think that there is something to be said, too, for how we think about oral tradition in the context of lines of evidence that haven’t necessarily been appreciated or valued.

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Oral traditions have long been studied by cultural anthropologists and other scholars.

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But these traditions have also been ignored or dismissed by scientists and considered unscientific.

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I think people forget, too, that there’s deep layers of knowledge embedded in these traditions.

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They often are telling people not just how to be good human beings, how to live a right, proper life, but also record details of deep time and history.

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We get the most from when we invite more people to the conversation.

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And more and more people are slowly starting to pay attention to this type of historical, in a narrow sense, information embedded in these oral traditions.

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David Bustos says that from the beginning of the project, he made a point to work with indigenous groups in the region.

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The White Sands team involved representatives from 32 different tribes in Pueblos.

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I think that’s one thing that’s been really exciting, is they have, some of these things have been known about for a very long time, and even words in their native languages for some of these animals.

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But then to see the record continue in, and for other people to be able to learn of them, it’s been really remarkable.

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Kim Charlie is a member of the Acoma Pueblo at Sky City in New Mexico.

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She sits on the Tribal Historical Preservation Board.

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She’s a partner on the White Sands Footprint Project, and she consults with the Park Service on the returning of artifacts and research and preservation of culturally important areas.

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Some of us have been living in the Southwest for a very long time.

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And our ancestors have been surviving in the Southwest for a very long time, because of our oral history.

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Although, you know, a lot of people now will probably think that, oh, that’s just a myth, but to us, it’s something sacred.

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It’s something that’s a continuous story that keeps us, our origin and our tradition alive today.

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And when David first informed the group that they had found footprints, oh, I was just so amazed.

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Oh, I wanted to be there.

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In May of 2021, Kim joined one of the first field trips back to the site since the pandemic started to see the footprints in person.

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There’s no words to describe what is down in White Sands.

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Now, in modern days, we have photographs, but this is their photograph, my ancestors’ photograph that they’ve left behind, saying, okay, we were here.

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We’re still continuing.

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Our spiritual entities are still here.

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We survived this long.

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We were here way before anybody else was here, you know.

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And we learned how to survive.

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And that’s the biggest thing, survival, you know.

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They were trying to survive, but yet continue to hold together their family and continue to see what was across on the other mountain, what’s out there, you know.

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Kim hopes the White Sands project can be a kind of model for how researchers and local Indigenous peoples can work together in the future.

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I hope, you know, anthropologists, archaeologists open their eyes to see how the connection lies back with us.

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David has really worked his hardest to try and, you know, try to connect us all back.

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And like I said, once when we found out about the footprints, it was just so amazing.

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I hope with White Sands and with David’s help that we get to open everybody’s eyes.

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We get to let them see how we’re connected back to these areas.

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The quest to identify and date the 61 known human footprints at White Sands has been David Bustos’ focus for much of the past two decades.

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But there is still so much to learn from the prints in the park.

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It’s now estimated that the fossilized animal footprints in the area number in the hundreds of thousands.

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So there have to be still more human footprints waiting to be found out there.

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Even if the dates are difficult for folks to accept, you can see that the animals and the people have lived with each other for a very long time just by looking at the layers over and over and over and over again.

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Were they on the landscape continuously or did they come and go as the area became wet?

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Because there’s many wet and dry records that can be seen where the landscape, you know, looks like it became very arid, but then it would become lush and green again.

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And so it’s these times of when we see the water, we also see the evidence of the people and the megafauna in the same areas.

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Outside of the park, scientists are using its landscape as a model to search for sites across the American West that might have preserved early evidence of human life.

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Public access to the White Sands trackways is restricted because they’re so fragile.

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And the team at White Sands is continuing to find and log trackways as quickly as they can before they erode away from water, wind, or our own human activities.

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Because people can’t go see the prints for themselves, they’re working on making the footprints more accessible in other ways by creating replica 3D model trackways and sharing the stories the trackways tell.

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These stories are a unique window into how the people who walked in White Sands so long ago interacted with each other and the Ice Age animals that lived alongside them.

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In our next episode, we’re sharing some of these stories and you won’t want to miss them.

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Thank you to Ray Pang, who reported, produced, and sound designed this episode.

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Thank you to everyone who shared their work for this story.

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And thank you to our friends at the Berkeley Geochronology Center.

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You can learn more through the links in your show notes.

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A special thanks to Leakey Foundation trustee, Naoma Tate, for generously sponsoring our episodes on White Sands.

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Origin Stories is a project of the Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries.

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If you don’t already subscribe to our monthly newsletter, please sign up through the link in your show notes.

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If you can, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation at leakeyfoundation.org slash origin stories.

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Every dollar will be matched, so your impact will be doubled.

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We really appreciate your support.

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Origin Stories is made possible by our listeners.

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With additional support from Naomi Tate, Jeannie Newman, Camilla and George Smith, the Anna and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.

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We’ll be back next month with more from White Sands.

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Our editor is Audrey Quinn.

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Theme music by Henry Nagle.

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Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Leigh Rosevere.

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As always, thanks for listening.