Matthew R. Bennett

Those Who Walked Before: Fossil Footprints at White Sands is, in many ways, a compelling book about evidence, persistence, and the material traces of deep human history. The authors frame White Sands as a discovery that “rewrites the timeline” of human occupation in the Americas, and the site’s footprint evidence has indeed been presented in archaeology as paradigm-shifting, with multiple studies since 2021 supporting an age in roughly the 21,000 to 23,000 year range. show more ([simonandschuster.com][1])

But through an intersectional feminist lens, the book’s limitations become just as visible as its strengths. What troubles me is not the footprints themselves, but the familiar structure of authority around them: three men narrating a “discovery” that Indigenous peoples have, in a different epistemic register, already held to be true since time immemorial. Indigenous writers and scholars have been explicit that the White Sands findings did not create this truth; they merely forced settler institutions to acknowledge what Native communities had long said about ancient presence on this land. University of Arizona reporting on the site likewise notes that the discoveries were met with calls for Western science to recognize Native peoples’ long-held understanding that their ancestors have occupied the Americas since time immemorial. ([High Country News][2])

That is where the book, at least in its premise and marketing, feels most frustrating. It risks turning Indigenous antiquity into a triumphal story about male scientific validation rather than asking why Indigenous knowledge had to wait for institutional approval in the first place. An intersectional feminist reading pushes on exactly that point: who gets to be called an expert, whose memory counts as evidence, and why colonial knowledge systems so often become legible only when filtered through credentialed men. So no, I do not think these three men have made some wholly new discovery in the broadest sense. What they have done is participate in the archaeological confirmation of something Indigenous peoples have long known, while still benefiting from a narrative structure that centers Western recognition over Indigenous continuity. ([simonandschuster.com][1])

Even so, I land at 4 stars because the subject itself is powerful, and the material record at White Sands is genuinely moving. Fossil footprints are intimate evidence: not monuments, not weapons, not abstract dates, but bodies in motion across land. That immediacy gives the story emotional force. I just wish the book more fully confronted the colonial politics of “discovery” and made more room for Indigenous women, elders, and knowledge keepers, whose understandings of time, place, and ancestral presence have too often been treated as supplementary rather than foundational. As a result, *Those Who Walked Before* sounds important, but not fully radical. Its strongest contribution may be less that it reveals something new than that it exposes how long dominant institutions refused to listen.

[1]: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Those-Who-Walked-Before/Matthew-Bennett/9... "Those Who Walked Before | Book by Matthew Bennett, David F. Bustos, Daniel Odess | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster"
[2]: https://www.hcn.org/issues/53-11/indigenous-affairs-archaeology-the-white-sands-... "The White Sands discovery only confirms what Indigenous people have said all along - High Country News" show less

This book was gifted to me through LibraryThing. I am always interested in prehistoric finds and this story about human fossil foot prints at White Sands was fascinating. It was written in such a way it could be easily understood by those not at home in the subject matter. There is still much to discover and this book breaks a lance to do just that. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had heard about the finding and was interested in the topic prior to receiving a copy of the book, so I had high expectations at the outset. These expectations were fully met. The science, history, personal insights, pictures, diagrams, and more made it a thoroughly satisfying read. The case for these footprints being as old as the authors claim is compelling. Nothing concerning the entire topic was missed. An engaging, entertaining, and informative book for anyone even slightly interested show more in the history of humans in America. Recommended. show less