This kind of survival is not common.

It is, in geological terms, extraordinarily rare.

Most of the evidence of most of the people who lived on this planet before the development of durable material culture — stone tools, ceramics — is simply gone.

The people of the Last Glacial Maximum left traces, but most of those traces did not survive the intervening twenty thousand years in any form we can read.

What White Sands has given us is a window through which we can see, briefly and specifically, a moment from a period we would otherwise know only in the most general terms.

A person walked across wet mud beside a lake in New Mexico twenty-three thousand years ago.