The people who made these impressions were walking, not running, in most of the preserved trackways.

Some appear to have been carrying things — the depth and distribution of pressure in the footprints changes in ways consistent with added weight on one side of the body.

Children ran alongside adults, their smaller footprints crossing and recrossing the larger ones in patterns that are recognizable to anyone who has walked a muddy path with a child in tow.

The white-tailed deer, the mammoth, the giant ground sloth, and other Ice Age megafauna also left impressions in the same sediments.

In some remarkable cases, human and animal trackways intersect — not because researchers placed them in proximity for dramatic effect, but because the same lakeshore that attracted people also attracted the animals they shared the landscape with, and the mud recorded all of them.

Those intersecting trackways became one of the most discussed features of the White Sands site — not just because of what they implied about the age of human presence, but because of what they preserved about behavior.