Archaeologists at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have identified 22,000-year-old drag marks preserved in ancient lakebed mud alongside some of the oldest known human footprints in the Americas. The marks are interpreted as evidence of a simple transport device known as a travois — a pair of wooden poles dragged along the ground with a load tied between them. Unlike wheeled carts, which would not appear until around 2500 BC in Mesopotamia, this device was wheel-less and pulled by people. The wood itself rotted long ago, but the grooves left behind hardened in mud and were later buried by sediment and preserved. Some tracks show a single dragged pole, while others show two parallel grooves, matching how travois function historically. Researchers compared the ancient traces with modern experiments conducted on mudflats in England and the United States. When volunteers dragged poles behind them, the marks closely matched the fossil impressions, including the way the grooves cut across human footprints — indicating the carts were pulled while walking. The drag paths often run for dozens of meters and are surrounded by many human footprints, including prints made by children. This suggests family groups were moving together, likely transporting supplies or animal meat along the edges of an Ice Age wetland. While some marks could theoretically be from dragging firewood, the repeated patterns, lengths of the grooves, and consistent association with footprints support the interpretation that this was a real transport method rather than incidental scraping. If confirmed by further study, these tracks represent the oldest known evidence of transport technology in the Americas and among the oldest in the world — revealing that Ice Age humans were already engineering practical solutions to move heavy loads thousands of years before wheels were invented.
World History
Public . 10-Dec-2025Archaeologists at White Sands National Park in New Mexico
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