The people who made footprints at White Sands during the Last Glacial Maximum are likely ancestral, in some general sense, to many of the peoples who were living in the Americas at the time of European contact — but the specific lines of descent are not knowable from the evidence currently available.

What can be said, and what is important to say clearly, is this: Indigenous nations whose traditional territories and oral histories are connected to the American Southwest have their own understanding of deep human presence in this landscape that does not depend on the approval of Western archaeology.

The Pueblo peoples, the Navajo Nation, the Apache nations, the Tohono O’odham, and other communities of the broader Southwest region have maintained continuous or near-continuous presence in the region for as long as their histories record, and their histories record a very long time.

When researchers discover and publicize evidence of human presence at 23,000 years before the present, they are not discovering that people were here.

Indigenous communities have never been under any illusion that people arrived recently.

What the scientific findings provide, for those communities, is sometimes useful — evidence that can be cited in legal and political contexts, corroboration of traditional histories that Western institutions have systematically doubted — and sometimes beside the point.