Study confirms White Sands footprints are ~23,000 years old
Results are consistent with two earlier studies dating the footprints to between 22,000 and 24,000 years ago.
Discussion
At that time, the northern half of the continent was several kilometers below massive sheets of ice. The existence of 23,000-year-old footprints could only mean that people were already living in what’s now New Mexico before the ice sheets sealed off the southern half of the continent from the rest of the world for the next few thousand years.