Fossil footprints show a human chasing an extinct giant sloth

Each year, 500,000 people visit New Mexico's White Sands National Monument to hike and frolic among gypsum dunes.

But in an epoch called the Pleistocene, which started 2.5 million years ago and ended about 12,000 years ago, the alkali flats and nearby lakes attracted giants. Mammoths and mastodons walked the playa, as did saber-tooth cats, North American camels and huge, 8,000-pound sloths.

Where these creatures went, ancient humans followed. We know this because the travelers left footprints — physical evidence that people chased the giants. In a western corner of White Sands, scientists recently found a human print inside a ground sloth's paw marks, they report in a new analysis of the park's tracks in the journal Science Advances.

"Thousands and thousands of trackways" crisscross the area, said Vince Santucci, a senior paleontologist with the National Park Service and an author of the new report. The official term for such concentrated pathways is a megatrack. The megatrack in White Sands "is the largest one that we know of in North America."

Researchers in 2011 began a systematic survey of the megatrack, including drone flights over the sand in 2014. This survey revealed the first collection of human tracks: 27 individual footprints that vanished into a dune.

Santucci and his colleagues measured the stride and the gait to predict where beneath the dune the next print should be and excavated the dune. "And lo and behold, right where we anticipated they would have been, were human footprints," he said.

Humans drove North American ground sloths to extinction around 11,000 years ago. Yet National Park Service paleontologists struggled to determine the age of the human prints using geologic techniques like carbon dating. "The dates are coming up all over the place," Santucci said. In 2016, they invited experts from around the world to help examine the tracks.

But Bennett decided to focus on the sloth tracks. He was excavating a sloth trackway when he found what looked like a "Klingon Bird-of-Prey in negative relief." (That's a type of starship, for the non-"Star Trek" fans.) It was, the paleontologists realized, two prints — human and sloth squished together. "Quite a lot of profane language" came next, Bennett said with a chuckle.

This discovery suggests a minimum age of the prints. They are at least 11,000 years old, as ancient as the last ground sloth.

A human followed quite literally in the sloth's footsteps. "Given the arid environment, there is quite a narrow amount of time you can walk on that surface to record your footprint," said Matteo Belvedere, a scientist with Switzerland's Paleontology A16 project who specializes in trackways and was not involved with this research.

The human probably followed the sloth within a day.

The tracks led the scientists to a site that suggests confrontation. Marks in the sand indicate the sloth turned to face approaching humans, scraping the knuckles of its front limbs along the ground as it did so.

"There's no evidence of hunting here," Milner said. "There's no kill site. Maybe ground sloths were fun to harass? Who knows."