They are describing something that the geological record of White Sands, however fragmentarily, now corroborates.

The footprints are not the beginning of the story of human presence in the Americas.

They are a window into a middle chapter of that story — the chapter we know the least about, the period that the ice and the sea and the ordinary destructive processes of geological time have done the most to obscure.

Finding a window into that chapter, in the specific, physical, intimate form of human footprints in hardened lakebed mud, is a remarkable thing.

It is also a reminder that the story is not finished.

The landscape of the Tularosa Basin still holds secrets.