What the genetics agree on, and what the White Sands dates corroborate, is that the story is old.

Considerably older than Clovis.

Old enough to encompass the Last Glacial Maximum.

Old enough to leave traces in the sediment of an ancient lake in New Mexico that twenty thousand years of geological change have not entirely erased.

The footprints are not the first chapter of the American human story.

They are one preserved page of a book that is mostly missing, documenting a moment in a process that had already been underway for some time and would continue for many thousands of years more.