In 2009 we found what we first thought were human footprints.

We can definitively say that human beings were present here at White Sands during the last Glacial Maximum, and that is far older than they have been confirmed anywhere else in North or South America.

That's hugely significant.

The shimmering dunes of White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, harbor an extraordinary secret.

Fossilized human footprints that suggest human presence in the Americas as much as 10,000 years earlier than previously believed.

How did these footprints in the sand managed to survive for so long?

How long before they're erased for good?

And why is their discovery changing everything we thought we knew about human history in the region.

White Sands is the largest gypsum sand dune in the world.

We have the San Andreas and then also the Sacramento Mountain range.

The first prints found in the basin were 1931 of a giant ground sloth, and at that time they thought they were Bigfoot.

In 2005, in 2006, this whole lake, everywhere you look, it was full of water.

And even the dunes flooded.

And as we were walking along the shore, we started to see mammoth and camel prints are popping out.

And then right over here is a human foot, so there's a heel.

and the toes up over here.

There's a child's print right here.

The heel and the toes.

And I was walking along the old lake bed, and then these amazing mammoth prints, and right next to them were these incredible elongated prints.

And they're both made of clay, but there's no clay anywhere else.

When I first seen them, you know, you look at them.

Is that possible?

Is that really what I'm seeing?

Is this a human walking next to a mammoth.

Many Native Americans say, well, we've been here forever.

And the archeologists just said, well, no, you haven't.

But suddenly we're pushing them back 10,000 years, 8,000 years further into the past than most archeologists were willing to, to agree.

I reached out to a lot of experts, and it took many years to confirm that there were human and megafauna together.

At first, there was a strong push back.

No, you know you don't have human footprints.

And so it wasn't until 2016 or 2017, January, where we were brushing out these incredible giant ground sloth footprints, and then we seen the sloth on top of the human footprints and then the human on top of the sloth.

Wow, you know we really finally have the evidence to show that they're walking together.

It's probably arguably the most important archeological site in the Americas that's been found in a couple of decades.

This is important and this is interesting because we want to know how long people have been in the Americas.

That's part of the global human story, you know, the, the global expansion of humans.

Here's the palm and then the fingers, and then again, the palm, the fingers and the knees, and then more fingers, a hand.

So it looks like they were crawling.

The most exciting thing about this site is the interaction of humans and animals.

So that's ancient humans, whatever age, interacting with extinct Ice Age megafauna.

Things like mammoth, giant ground sloth, camel.

They show you interactions of people walking along with the megafauna.

You see children jumping in mud, or you'll see a mother picking up a child and walking with it.

Or someone going after a giant ground sloth, and it stands up and spins around and leaves claw marks on the ground.

The person starts walking backwards, another person running from a different direction.

One of my favorite prints we have is actually the mother carrying the child, and there's one spot where she slips and at the exact same spot you see a giant ground sloth slips right there too, and it catches itself with its tail.

It's so funny.

A long time ago, we believe that the animals and us communicated, that maybe they didn't necessarily talk, but that's what we believe, but we all have this interconnectedness, and when we see this panel in the mud, it tells the story of that.

Like my people have always said and other tribes have said, we have always been here, and I hope that this will substantiate that claim in a way.

It was commonly thought by a lot of the academic community that the people were here between 12 and 14,000 is sort of the accepted range.

And so our prints are pushing that back almost 10,000 years earlier than that.

We've been able to confirm the prints are 23,000 years before present.

And what's exciting is the dates, they've been confirming themselves over and over from different labs throughout the country.

We've been able to date some of the seeds and then many pollen layers over and over.

These Ice Age pluvial lake systems that are now modern day playas, dry lake beds.

They do a really excellent job and it looks like it's that layering wet and dry and wet and dry.

And now we're starting to look into the stratigraphy, and you can see 2 or 3 meters and 17, 18 layers over and over and over and over and over again.

But it just confirms, you know, young dates up here and then they get older.

I think the other sort of misconception is it's one small spot, and no, it's across 80,000 acres.

We have thousands and thousands of fossil footprints.

Now, I would say we can go out every day of the week, probably, and then find hundreds of prints, new prints.

In some places we do get big flash floods that just wash, you know, a tremendous amount of sediment, and we're losing prints at the edge of the lake bed.

The other thing that's happening in different areas, we see large drying events in some places.

Over 2 or 3 months, you might have two inches, three inches of sediment and it's just blowing away.

They're gone forever.

Ultimately, we concluded that it's pretty tough to preserve this stuff.

We can document it, but it it's eroding.

So we've kind of retooled our efforts towards documentation rather than trying to preserve things because that that's just fighting against nature at this point.

I think, you know, at the heart of all of us we're the same, you know, children, everybody, if there's a puddle he'll jump in the mud and play in the mud, or, you know, you'll pick up your child you'll be carrying and you know what it feels like.

And that's the thing, it's a footprint, but you understand it.

There's a close connection because we all leave footprints I guess behind.

The stories they tell are timeless and they're rapidly being lost.

I think that's, you know, one of the big needs to document them as quickly as we can.