Traces of some of South America’s earliest people found under ancient dirt pyramid

Science ^ | 24 May, 2017 | Lizzie Wade

[MtnClimber]

About 600 kilometers north of Peru, an imposing earthen mound looms over the sea. People began building the ceremonial structure, called Huaca Prieta, about 7800 years ago. But according to a new study, the true surprise lies buried deep beneath the 30-meter-tall mound: stone tools, animal bones, and plant remains left behind by some of the earliest known Americans nearly 15,000 years ago. That makes Huaca Prieta one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas and suggests that the region’s first migrants may have moved surprisingly slowly down the coast.

The evidence of early human occupation stunned Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who led the new study. Initially, he was interested in examining the mound itself. But geologists on his team wanted to study the landform under the mound, so “we just kept going down,” he says. The deepest pit, which took 5 years to excavate, reached down 31 meters. Shockingly, those deep layers contained telltale signs of human occupation, Dillehay’s team reports today in Science Advances: evidence of hearth fires, animal bones, plant remains, and simple but unmistakable stone tools. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal place the earliest human occupation at nearly 15,000 years ago.

That’s made some researchers say Huaca Prieta should join the small but growing list of pre-14,000-year-old sites that have revolutionized scientists’ vision of the earliest Americans. Archaeologists used to think that people walked from Siberia through an ice-free passage down Alaska and Canada, reaching the interior of the United States about 13,000 years ago. In recent years, however, well documented earlier sites like Chile’s Monte Verde have convinced most archaeologists that humans made it deep into the Americas by 14,500 years ago, meaning that they would have had to cross Canada long before an ice-free corridor existed.

[heylady]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3170959/Were-Aborigines-AMERICANS-Native-tribes-Amazon-closely-related-indigenous-Australians.html

I read an article that early inhabitants of Australia may have travelled across the ocean to reach the coast of South America.

[T-Bone Texan]

THEY WERE SOLUTREANS AND THEY WERE WHITE.

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.

[blam]

"I read Michener’s book “The Tell” (iirc) years ago, about the Israeli hilltop cities built on top of previous cities. I think most of the previous towns were destroyed in battles, but perhaps natural and manmade disasters too. Then they would start all over again. I’m guessing a lot of history in the mound down through the ages."

Story Of A Tel (Tell, mound, heap)

[blam]

"I read an article that early inhabitants of Australia may have travelled across the ocean to reach the coast of South America."

Posted here on FR 14 years ago:

'First Americans Were Australian'

This is the face of the first known American, Lucia