Posted on 09/09/2019 5:35:16 PM PDT by Openurmind
CORVALLIS, Ore. Stone tools and other artifacts unearthed from an archaeological dig at the Coopers Ferry site in western Idaho suggest that people lived in the area 16,000 years ago, more than a thousand years earlier than scientists previously thought.
The artifacts would be considered among the earliest evidence of people in North America.
The findings, published today in Science, add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pacific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor, said Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and the studys lead author.
The Coopers Ferry site is located along the Salmon River, which is a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin. Early peoples moving south along the Pacific coast would have encountered the Columbia River as the first place below the glaciers where they could easily walk and paddle in to North America, Davis said. Essentially, the Columbia River corridor was the first off-ramp of a Pacific coast migration route.
The timing and position of the Coopers Ferry site is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration.
Coopers Ferry, located at the confluence of Rock Creek and the lower Salmon River, is known by the Nez Perce Tribe as an ancient village site named Nipéhe. Today the site is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
(Excerpt) Read more at today.oregonstate.edu ...
In the late 1990s I met a woman anthropologist at an east coast bar who had left California. She told me there was a lot of controversy about human remains or traces there that were over 100,000 years old.
Hmm, yeah, there's a small number of those (that have been talked about -- those kinds of findings end careers), different sites, both continents.
There is no such thing as a stupid question. :)
Sunken Civ is on the money as always, But one detail I would like to add is soil layers. Digs are done inch by inch, one layer of soil at a time as they go deeper. And over time soil was deposited over these sites in layers. So if they find a lithic at a certain depth and layer of soil, and they also find organic materials that can be dated in that same layer, then they are almost certainly the same age as long as the soil has not somehow been disturbed.
One of the reasons these discoveries come so slow and few in between is because while many lithics might be found at a site, The chances of finding corresponding organic material to date a layer and lithics also in that same layer are actually pretty rare. Animal bones, a cooking fire hearth, lithics, and a human burial together are the jack pot of course.
So while some lithics can be dated from a particular style of knapping because they are the same or similar to other known previously dated lithic cultures, 999 out of a 1000 date estimates for digs are always discredited until organics are also found and carbon dated.
At this site they have found western stemmed style lithic points very similar to the ancient Jomon stemmed points found in Japan. This is what has them looking in that direction as the source of the occupants at this site. A burial would be golden to find, then DNA could possibly be chased down and traced to origin.
My creek is older than your creek
Then you get the degree
I personally know the Archaeologist who had the last say in shutting down the Calico dig. He had no choice, his .gov employers forced him to. I have also personally handled what very well could be classified as primitive Acheulean and Levallois style finds from the ancient shore line around Lake Manix.
Yeah, this place really is old, no fooling.
This was a busy place, in a slow and drawn-out way.
Thank you for that list!
That's right. I know the guy who did most of the lithic analysis on this dig.
Right on! Thank you for that confirmation. I would be very interested if they find out more and any solid connections. I have always been very interested in the early “Incipient” Jomon culture. I agree with many that even 16.5 k ago they were already a seafaring culture.
Stone tools suggest the first Americans came from Japan
Comparison of Coopers Ferry projectile points with late Pleistocene age Tachikawa-type stemmed points from the Kamishirataki 2 site on Hokkaido, Japan. (A) Stemmed projectile point haft fragment from LU3 (B) Illustration of Japanese Upper Paleolithic stemmed projectile point from the Kamishiritaki 2 site (C) Blade fragment of projectile point from LU3 (D) Stemmed projectile point haft fragment from LU3 (E) Illustration of Japanese Upper Paleolithic stemmed projectile point from the Kamishiritaki 2 site as one possible comparison for the reconstructed stemmed projectile point shown in (C) and (D). (F) Stemmed projectile point from PFA2 (73-627). (G) Stemmed projectile point from PFA2 (73-628). (H) Stemmed projectile point from PFA2 (73-626). (I to K) Illustrations of Japanese Upper Paleolithic stemmed projectile points from the Kamishiritaki 2 site
This is what the Columbia River basin would have looked like 16,000 years ago.
Thank you for the graphics and comparison!
So, the Indians stole the land from someone, and Caucasians conquered it and ‘stole’ it from Indians.
The official line at Calico was, Leakey's selections of natural vs artificial seemed to be irreproducible. Overall, Leakey's view that the Americas must have been occupied more than the then-dominant view was obviously correct. Before Clovis-first-and-only, the official line was that the Americas had been colonized a mere 3000 years ago, or perhaps 5000 years ago. Archaeology of the Americas needs a dental plan, it's like pullin' teeth...
Calico: A 200,000-year Old Site In The Americas?
ASA On Line | unknown
Posted on 12/17/2001 2:22:22 PM PST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/592435/posts
Guess what I found archived in my stuff from back when it happened... The prismatic blades are pretty hard to discredit.
https://www.earthmeasure.com/calico/
Thanks!
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