The people of the trackways — whoever they were, however they had arrived, whatever languages they spoke and beliefs they held — were part of a larger human history of this hemisphere that is still being recovered and still being understood.

What Survives When Everything Else Is Gone

There is something in the White Sands footprints that resists purely analytical treatment — something that is apparent when you read the descriptions of researchers first recognizing what the exposed surfaces contained.

Twenty thousand years of geological history had passed between the moment when a person pressed their foot into wet mud on the shore of Lake Otero and the moment when a researcher at White Sands National Monument bent down to look more carefully at an irregular surface in the exposed lakebed and recognized it for what it was.

In that interval, empires rose and fell and were forgotten.

Languages that were once spoken by millions went extinct without leaving a record.