An experiment conducted on a beach in Maine, above, shows how multiple contact points can make grooves that are parallel and equidistant, similar to the tracks uncovered in New Mexico. (Thomas M. Urban/Cornell University)
Ancient Native Americans probably used makeshift “transport technology” to drag their possessions from place to place more than 20,000 years ago, a new study finds — and the evidence of the technology is embedded in sediment in White Sands National Park in New Mexico.
Published in Quaternary Science Advances, the study looks at newly discovered fossilized grooves and footprints discovered in fine-grained sediment at the park, which contains footprints from as far back as 23,000 years ago.
Researchers think the grooves are the remnants of tracks left behind by “travois,” an ancient transport vehicle used before the invention of the wheel. The travois appear to have been made of poles that were either joined together at one end or crossed in the middle. Their users would have loaded them up with bulky objects, then grabbed the poles and dragged them behind them — similar to using a wheelbarrow or rickshaw with no wheels.
Indigenous research collaborators monitored the site and helped excavate it. They agreed that “the most likely explanation is that the linear marks were made with some form of travois,” technology long used by Native American people and others and documented in oral history, ethnographic literature and other accounts.
Historically, some travois were dragged by domesticated dogs and later horses, but the presence of footprints parallel to the linear grooves suggest the ones in White Sands were dragged by humans. The researchers believe they were used to transport goods including firewood and food, among other items.
To test the hypothesis, the researchers created their own travois, then dragged them through muddy regions in Britain and Maine; the experiments produced similar footprints and lines, they write.
Because they were made of wood, the original travois have long since disintegrated and are lost to time. But their track marks are one of the earliest known pieces of evidence of the use of transportation technology by ancient people, the researchers write.
“Every discovery that we uncover in White Sands adds to our understanding of the lives of the first people to settle in the Americas,” Sally Reynolds, a mammalian paleontologist at Bournemouth University in Britain and a co-author of the study, said in a news release. “These people were the first migrants to travel to North America and understanding more about how they moved around is vital to being able to tell their story.”