The footprints preserve behavior, not identity.

The sediments preserve organic material that can be dated, not stories or names or songs.

The ancient lakeshore of the Tularosa Basin gives up the impressions of feet but nothing more intimate than that.

The scientific literature on White Sands has been appropriately cautious about attempting to link the ancient people of the footprints to any specific modern Native nation or community.

The evidence is too old, the genetic record too sparse, and the complexity of fifteen to twenty thousand years of population history too great to support confident specific identifications.

People moved, mixed, diverged, and merged across the millennia between 23,000 years ago and the historical period.