The White Sands dates, taken together with the body of pre-Clovis evidence that had been accumulating over the preceding decades, force a reckoning with the existing frameworks for understanding how people arrived in the Americas.

The Clovis-first model, already weakened by Monte Verde, the Paisley Caves, and other pre-Clovis sites, cannot accommodate a Last Glacial Maximum presence in New Mexico.

The timeline is simply incompatible.

If people were at White Sands 23,000 years ago, and if the ice-free interior corridor did not open until approximately 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, then the route through the ice that the Clovis-first model proposed is ruled out as the primary pathway for the people who made those footprints.

The coastal migration model — the hypothesis that early Americans moved southward along the Pacific Coast, using boats or coastal terrain to move around the edge of the ice — becomes more attractive in light of White Sands, though it is not definitively proven by it.

The Pacific Coast at 23,000 years ago was partially glaciated in the far north but may have had ice-free stretches in what is now British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.