A team of archaeologists led by researcher Thomas Urban from Cornell University found human footprints that date from the last ice age in the salt flats of the Utah Testing and Training Range (UTTR) of the Air Force.
The news release reported that these unusual ancient tracks were dubbed the "ghost footprints" because of the earth's composition, which makes them only visible after the rain and disappears when it dries up.
Ghost Footprints: A Serendipitous Find
The team accidentally discovered the footprints while driving to another nearby archaeological site at Hill Air Force Base in the Great Salt Lake Desert. They were working at the two open-air hearths in the UTTR dated at the end of the last Ice Age, in which one site has the earliest evidence of human tobacco use and is only about half a mile from where the footprints were discovered.
They initially found only a handful of footprints, so they decided to use ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which works by firing radio waves to the ground that bounce off objects hidden and revealed a total of 88 footprints.
Daron Duke, a co-author of the study from Far Western Anthropological Research Group, and Urban were driving when they suddenly spotted the ghost footprints. They stopped to look and Urban immediately recognized the tracks as a familiar sight similar to those found in White Sands National Park, where the earliest known human footprints in the Americas were found.
Urban noted that finding the ghost footprints was a serendipitous find. So when they returned the next day, they used the GPR to look for more. Since he previously refined the application of the method, he was able to spot the hidden tracks immediately. He pointed out that the tracks were just part of the story, just like the footprints in White Sands.
He added that there could be more archaeological sites in Utah, like the White Sands, that only needed ground-penetrating radar to image what is beneath and find more footprints from other sites.
Ghost Footprints are From Human Adults and Children
According to Live Science, although the unusual tracks had an eerie name, they belong to humans. All 88 individual footprints belonged to a range of adults and children that could be as young as five years old based on the GPR technique that revealed the footprints.
Researchers estimated that the footprints were left by bare human feet between 12,000 to 10,000 years ago when the area was still a wasteland during the last stretch of the ice age that happened during the Pleistocene epoch about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.
Hill Air Force Base cultural resource manager Anya Kitterman said that finding the ghost footprints is a "once-in-a-lifetime discovery" and that they found more than what they bargained for. The discovery is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal as the team continues to analyze the footprints.
They are trying to figure out the exact age of the small organic pieces that could have been trapped in the sediment of the footprints using radiocarbon dating to know the exact age.
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