In several documented cases, human footprints appear within sloth tracks — people stepping into the depressions made by the enormous animal’s feet.

This could indicate that people were following or tracking sloths, using the animal’s already-pressed impressions as convenient footholds in soft mud, or simply that both species were using the same path at different times.

Columbian mammoths also left tracks at White Sands, some preserved in the same general sediment exposures as human footprints, though the precise stratigraphic relationship between mammoth and human trackways at this site is an active area of research.

The presence of mammoth tracks in the same landscape as human tracks does not prove human-mammoth interaction at White Sands specifically, but it documents that people and mammoths shared this landscape — a fact with obvious implications for questions about whether human hunting pressure contributed to the megafauna extinctions, a debate that has continued for decades.

The trackways also reveal more intimate details of the people who made them.

One of the most discussed individual trackway sequences at White Sands — sometimes called the “mother and child” trackway, though that identification is interpretive rather than proven — appears to preserve an adult and a small child walking together.