NewMexico
Researchers show: In the Ice Age, children played in the footsteps of giant sloths
So the children could once have romped around in the huge footsteps
© Karen Carr/National Park Service
The American continent was once populated by giant sloths, which left correspondingly large footprints. When they filled with water, it became a play paradise for children.
It’s rare to envy the people of the past. Even with the ancestors who lived through world wars or had to get along without penicillin, you don’t want to swap places. And until now, nobody has had the desire to swap modern times for the Pleistocene – an epoch that began about 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,600 years ago.
Towards the end of the Pleistocene, people probably spread to the American continent for the first time. And there they met its animal inhabitants. Undisturbed by humans, unusually large animals had evolved in North and South America, which were connected by a land bridge. There were mammoths, American lions that weighed up to 500 kilos, the toxodon, a kind of primeval hippopotamus, giant armadillos – and giant sloths. And yes, for animal lovers, the existence of giant sloths would probably be reason enough to drop everything in the present and jump into the time machine towards the Pleistocene.
Children have always loved to play in puddles
As researchers have now been able to prove, the first human inhabitants of the American continent were actually big fans of the cozy giant animals. Probably also because they left footprints of about 50 centimeters with their paws – and in areas with damp soil these tracks filled with water.
This is what the giant sloths looked like. Children also played in their footsteps during the Ice Age.
© National Park Service
British scientist Matthew Bennett, a professor at the University of Bournemouth, discovered such a sloth track in New Mexico, which once led through a dried-up river. The water left in the ground filled them up, attracting children to run around in the puddles that formed.
Bennett was able to prove this by examining the children’s petrified footprints in New Mexico. He was able to identify at least four different children who had played in the giant puddle there around 20,000 to 11,700 years ago, but there were probably more – due to the muddy ground at the time, several tracks can no longer be clearly assigned, because the children naturally jumped and slid around, so her feet didn’t just push straight into the ground.
The giant sloths would not survive much longer
“All kids like to play in mud puddles, and that’s what this is,” says Matthew Bennett. He suspects the children were accompanying a group of adults looking for food. Unfortunately, that was later to be the undoing of the peaceful giant sloths: in addition to climate changes, which hit the animals badly, they were heavily hunted by humans. This would eventually lead to their extinction.
Like many other large animals of the Americas, they did not long survive the arrival of humans. Today there are only their much smaller relatives there.
Source: “live science”