At White Sands National Park in New Mexico, archaeologists identified 20,000-year-old human footprints and parallel drag marks that they believe were left by a travois.
A travois is a simple wooden frame made from two intersecting poles bound together in an A or X shape. Heavy loads rest on the frame, which a person then drags behind them. This new finding is the earliest proof of human transportation technology in the Americas.
Indigenous people in the Great Plains regularly used travois to haul their goods and tents around. While dogs or horses pulled more modern travois, the ancient tracks at White Sands indicate a time when humans themselves dragged them from place to place. Modern indigenous people from the region agree with these conclusions.
Drag marks showing parallel lines. Photo: Bournemouth University
A shopping cart minus the wheels
The presence of both adult and children’s footprints beside the drag marks paints a vivid picture of prehistoric family life. Adults transported the belongings while kids walked nearby. Matthew Bennett, the lead author of the study, likened it to the modern use of shopping carts.
“Many people are familiar with pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket…with children hanging on,” he said. “This appears to be the ancient equivalent, but without wheels.”
We know that our earliest ancestors must have used some form of transportation to carry their possessions, but any wooden vehicles have long rotted away.
“These drag marks give us the first indication of how they moved heavy, bulky loads around before wheeled vehicles existed,” says Bennett.
The team began excavating the site four years ago. In 2023, they dated footprints to somewhere between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. If they are correct — there remains some debate around the topic — then humans arrived in North America a few thousand years earlier than we’ve believed.
A modern A-shaped travois. Photo: Bournemouth University
The drag marks, some of which extended over 50 meters, were preserved in dried mud and buried under sediment. Some were single lines, others two parallel lines very close together. The team thinks this shows the two types of travois used by the ancient humans. The single lines show the tracks made by an A-shaped frame. The parallel lines show tracks made by an X-shaped frame.
To test their hypothesis, the research team constructed replica travois and dragged them across mudflats in Dorset, UK, and Maine in the U.S. The resulting marks closely mirrored the ancient tracks at White Sands.
