Ancient Travel Tech Discovered at White Sands Shocks Scientists

Scientists have found evidence of human transportation technology that’s 22,000 years old at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. This amazing discovery completely changes what we know about early human history.

The discovery involves tracks of ‘travois’ – simple vehicles made from long sticks with baskets or nets attached. People would pull these devices to move heavy items across the land.

“Everyone has stuff to transport, but we have no record of it until written histories”, geographical scientist Matthew Bennett and hominin palaeoecologist Sally Reynolds write in an essay for the Conversation, writes SFGATE.

Transportation technology
These ancient tracks date back to 20,000 BC, which is 16,000 years earlier than experts previously thought humans had transportation technology.

The scientists found these tracks mixed with human footprints in the sand at White Sands. To make sure they were really travois tracks, researchers ruled out other possibilities like animal bones, sloth tails, or driftwood from the ancient lake that once covered the area.

Perfectly matched
To test their theory, archaeologist Daniel Odess and his colleague Matthew Bennett built their own travois. They tested them on beaches in Maine and the UK, pulling cargo – including Bennett’s young daughter. The tracks they made matched the ancient ones perfectly.

“It felt like such an obvious thing for people to use,” Odess said. “I mean, these are anatomically modern people with big brains, just like yours and mine, and they were probably even more ingenious than we are, because they had to be.”

Transport meat
The travois would have been incredibly useful for early humans living near Lake Otero, which once covered 1,600 miles of what is now New Mexico. They could have used them to transport meat without dragging it through mud, and even to carry tired children.

What’s most amazing about this discovery is how it connects us to people who lived thousands of years ago. As Odess described working at the site: “Sometimes we’d be working away and just sort of pause and look at it all, and get a real chill, because it’s so, so relatable and yet so removed in time.”