Holloman AFB nearly abuts the former White Sands testing grounds -- where, as we earlier mentioned, 23,000 year old social group footprints were found in some fossilized mud -- scraped bare, by a-bomb blast tests. This area of the US Southwest has clearly been home to some of the earliest versions of homo sapiens, in communal living groups, it would seem -- at least in the Western hemisphere. Here is the latest (as our graphic marries the 2021 find with today's, at Holloman):
. . .The site had been buried by nearby white sand dunes, and contained around 70 items that let the squadron glean more insights into the state’s ancient inhabitants. . . .
The site’s original users were classified as “Paleo-Archaic.” The term refers to the first stages of the transition of human communities in the area from being hunting and gathering specialists into agriculturalists that subsisted on a broader range of foods, according to the National Park Service.
“It’s significant because we have very few intact sites from this time period because. . . of the erosional nature of a desert environment. This is a situation in which the site retains a high degree of integrity,” Mr. Cuba told the Santa Fe New Mexican on Monday.
The squadron has named the latest archaeological site as Gomolak Overlook, which references the previous cultural resources manager, J.R. Gomolak, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. . . .
It is sublimely ironic, that -- but for Robert Oppenheimer's tests of atomic weaponry at White Sands, these footprints, and now settlements emerging from under the sand, might have never been unearthed, under dozens of feet of white sands. . . sands, blasted away by a-bombs, in 1945.
Were these long dead, communal and gentle peoples still alive, and watching in 1945, I am not so sure they would have regarded any of it as. . . progress, of any sort. Onward.
नमस्ते
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