Dating Problems with Fossil Footprints

Down New Mexico way, a traveler can find White Sands National Park. Lots of big dunes comprised of gypsum. Have you ever gone sand sledding? That and other National Park activities like camping, hiking trails, stargazing and such are there.

Also, fossilized footprints. They had mammoths, giant sloths, and many creatures in what was once a much nicer climate. Yes, there are human footprints as well. Assigning dates to them are a vexation to secular scientists because the results conflict with the narrative of when humans were supposed to live there.

Fossil footprints, White Sands National Park / NPS photo (usage does not imply endorsement), modified at PhotoFunia

Scientists are disagreeing about the carbon dating results, which showed that humans were in North America sooner than secular views expect and conflicts with the evolutionary story. Radiometric dating is dependent on assumptions, so the carbon dating used on relevant plants can be adjusted to more convenient levels. The same with dating strata. Biblical creationists would say that the footprints correlate to the dispersion of people from Babel about 4,000 years ago.

Scientists have discovered human footprints in the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico, USA; more specifically in the White Sands National Park. Recently assigned radiometric dates of these footprints conflict with the previous understanding of human occupation of North America based on genetic reconstruction studies.

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These footprints have recently been conventionally dated to 23–21 ka before present (BP), which the researchers believe correlates with the period of the Ice Age in North America (the Late Pleistocene). The dates have been determined by the stratigraphy, together with carbon dating of co-located seeds from freshwater plants. The plant in question, Ruppia cirrhosa, more commonly known as spiral ditchgrass or spiral tasselweed, grows today in fresh or brackish shallow water, with its foliage sourcing carbon from the water, not the air (figure 3). The researchers discounted hard water or reservoir effects as having any significance on their findings, partly because of the shallow nature of the water in which the plants grew, which would have led to the likely exchange of atmospheric carbon into the water over time.

You can read it all at "Equivocal carbon dating of ancient footprints in Tularosa Basin, New Mexico."