Define Irony: Newly Discovered 23,000 Year Old Human Footprints -- In Same General Area As The World's First "Trinity" (Nuclear Bomb) Test...

A quite wise commenter mentioned this discovery, so it has become our featured weekend bill of fare.

Even so, I can't help but recall the other reason a sixty-some mile wide circle around the archeological site is embedded in (at least my) memories. You see, seventy-six years ago, on a clear July 16 -- the US detonated the world’s first atomic bomb, approximately 60 miles north of what is now the White Sands National Monument.

"Trinity" was placed atop a steel tower that was called "Zero" -- thus Ground Zero was at the foot of the tower. Measuring instruments, and observation points were set at varying distances from that spot. And so, all that horrifying destruction we had been able to will into existence. . . was born. And born not even a two day hike from where ancient humans lived in peace, some 23,000 years ago.

Yes -- it is odd (to me at least) that now, seventy six years later, we learn that the Trinity site blast may also have erased other evidence of much earlier human settlements -- settlements of those that we would come to call. . . Indigenous-, or Mezo-Americans. Yet and still, we seem to have gotten lucky. Not far from Trinity, archeologists have just recently found fossilized footprints, left in mud eons ago -- with various seeds embedded in those foot-prints. And so we now may place humans in what we call New Mexico almost 10,000 years earlier than we had previously expected. Here's the latest bit:

. . .“Seeds embedded in the footprints were radiocarbon dated and analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey to establish their age. The research dramatically extends the range for the coexistence of humans and Pleistocene (ice age) megafauna and confirms that humans were present in North America before the major glacial advances at the height of the last ice age closed migration routes from Asia,” a release read.

The discovery points to human occupation in the Tularosa Basin beginning at least 23,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously believed. . . .

Scientists from White Sands National Park, the National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Bournemouth University, University of Arizona and Cornell University, in connection with the park’s Native American partners, all collaborated and consulted on this research. . . .

So. . . what path will we as humans choose? One that destroys our tiny, fragile blue life raft -- or one that preserves perhaps a million years of hominid life records? I for one think we need to spend more time thinking. . . longer term.

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