Speed Week is a Bonneville Salt Flats tradition that takes place at the Bonneville International Speedway in August. Since the wetland conditions needed to produce such trackways have not existed in this corner of the Great Salt Lake desert for at least 10,000 years, it gives researchers a handhold to date these footprints back to the end of the last Ice Age.The flats are open year-round, but there are events held there throughout the summer and fall. The sites are located within a half mile of each other in the so-called “Old River Bed Delta” thought to have been a large wetland. The discovery, at what is now being called the Trackway Site, expands on the ongoing research of discoveries made in 2016 at the nearby Wishbone Site. Archaeologist Daron Duke shows visitors the Ice Age footprints. The researchers believe that these ancient humans walked through a layer of sand in shallow water, with an underlying layer of mud that held the shape of the prints. “Based on excavations of several prints, we’ve found evidence of adults with children from about five to 12 years of age that were leaving bare footprints,” Duke said in a US Air Force press release. “We detected many more invisible prints by radar.” The researchers initially came across “ghost tracks” -footprints that appear under certain moisture conditions before disappearing again.Ī total of 88 footprints made by bare feet in the mud were found, excavated, and documented. “As was the case at White Sands, the visible ghost tracks were just part of the story,” Urban told the Cornell Chronicle. Based on that research, Urban knew that there would be more to find than just the handful of footprints that were briefly visible at the surface level. Upon examination, Urban could liken the find to some of his previous work at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, where he investigated “remarkable” Pleistocene human trackways left in the mud at a time when the land, now a desert, had a completely different topography.
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