They opened a new phase of it.

In the years since the 2021 paper appeared, the pace of research on early human presence in the Americas has accelerated.

The demonstration that physical evidence from the Last Glacial Maximum can survive in specific geological contexts has focused attention on identifying other such contexts — other environments where ancient evidence might have been preserved against the ordinary destructive processes of time.

Lake and wetland sediments are particularly promising.

The same conditions that allowed preservation at White Sands — fine-grained sediment, rapid burial, stable chemical environment — exist in other ancient lake basins across the American West and in underwater deposits along the continental shelf.

Researchers studying lake sediment cores from Nevada, California, and other western states have identified sediment horizons from the Last Glacial Maximum that contain organic material and, in some cases, evidence of human activity.