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Shoutout to the museum volunteer in Denver who showed me why 1,200 year old footprints got preserved in Utah
I was at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science two Saturdays ago and a volunteer named Walt pulled me over to a case I would have walked right past. It was a chunk of dried mud from the Great Salt Lake desert in Utah with human footprints pressed into it, and I figured they were maybe a few hundred years old. Walt told me they tested at around 12,000 years old, which makes them some of the oldest human tracks found anywhere in North America. Here is the part that blew my mind. The prints only survived because the mud dried fast in the sun and then got covered by a thin layer of salt crust, which locked them in place before wind or rain could wipe them out. If the weather had been even a little different that day, we would have zero record of those people walking through there. Walt has been volunteering there for 9 years and he said he still gets goosebumps when he talks about it. Does anyone know if they have found more tracks out there since the first batch made the news?
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parker_park82d ago
Walt at the Denver museum sounds like the kind of guy who makes you stop and think. I've noticed this pattern with all kinds of old things, like the cave paintings in France that only survived because a rock slide sealed the entrance for thousands of years. Or those bog bodies in Ireland that stayed intact just because the water was cold and had no oxygen. It seems like most of what we know about ancient people comes down to pure luck with the dirt and weather. We only get the stuff that happened to get buried or dried at the exact right moment. The rest just faded away and nobody will ever know it was there.
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