The 23,000-Year-Old Footprints Found In New Mexico – And The Evidence That Rewrote America’s Human Timeline

But none of them came from the Last Glacial Maximum — the period roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets were at their maximum extent and the Bering land bridge itself was at its widest.

White Sands did.

A date of 23,000 years placed human presence in New Mexico at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum.

Not after the glaciers began to retreat.

Not in the period when an ice-free corridor might have been opening.

During the coldest, most glaciated phase of the entire Ice Age — a period when the standard model would have said that not only were people not in New Mexico, they had not yet completed the transition from northeastern Asia into Alaska at all.