The sediment held it for twenty thousand years, waiting for the moment when someone would look down and understand what they were seeing.

The dunes are still moving.

New surfaces are still coming to light.

The investigation is still ongoing.

What else the ancient lakebed of the Tularosa Basin holds in its hardened sediment, what other moments of human life from the Last Glacial Maximum are waiting beneath the white gypsum, is not yet known.

But the footprints that have already been found are enough to have changed the story permanently.