Researchers at White Sands National Park report possible traces of a travois — an X-shaped wooden frame used to haul loads — preserved as linear drag marks alongside adult and child footprints and mammoth tracks dated to about 22,000 years ago. The impressions were infilled by sand and later lithified, preserving them when the original wood decayed. While the evidence could indicate early transport technology, the team cautions some marks might reflect hauling firewood rather than a travois.
Possible 22,000-Year-Old Travois Traces Found at White Sands, New Mexico
Archaeologists working at White Sands National Park in New Mexico report possible traces of a travois — an X-shaped frame of wooden poles lashed together and used to drag loads — preserved alongside human and mammoth footprints in late Pleistocene sediments dated to about 22,000 years ago.
Evidence and context
The team documented adult and child footprints in a sedimentary surface that also contains linear drag marks. Some footprints are intersected or interrupted by those linear traces, a pattern consistent with people hauling belongings behind them on a travois. The entire assemblage lies adjacent to a well-known mammoth "trampling ground," strengthening the site's Pleistocene context.
How impressions were preserved
Wooden poles and twine used to make travois decompose rapidly and rarely survive in the archaeological record. The researchers explain that what can be preserved are the impressions and drag marks left in soft sediments when those features were later infilled by wind-blown sand and other materials. Over millennia, those fills lithified into sandstone, keeping a record of the original impressions.
Publication and caution
The findings were reported in the journal Quaternary Science Advances. The authors note this may represent one of the earliest indirect pieces of evidence for the use of transport technology, but they also caution that some of the linear traces could alternatively have been made while dragging firewood or other materials rather than a travois.
Why it matters
If confirmed as travois marks, the White Sands record would provide rare indirect evidence that people in North America used simple transport technology tens of thousands of years before the first wheeled vehicles appeared in the archaeological record — wheeled carts are typically dated to about 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, according to the Iowa State University Institute for Transportation.
“This unique footprint record may represent one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the use of transport technology,” the authors wrote in Quaternary Science Advances.
Additional analysis and comparisons with experimental and ethnographic trampling and dragging traces will be needed to strengthen the travois interpretation and rule out other possible causes of the drag marks.
