And the map keeps changing. There is a large area of Eastern Oregon, Southern Idaho. N.Nevada, clear to the Rockies by the Great Salt Lake known as the Great Basin. It was once full of water to about 5,000 feet elevation. All that’s left is Salt Lake and Malheur lake in Oregon. It started draining when the Columbia Gorge broke thru.
The University of Oregon has a dig going on the high water mark in Eastern Oregon. So far they’ve dated their hole to 18,000 years and they’re still digging. They haven’t published details yet but have found tools, etc. pretty much all the way down. What they’ve published so far has pushed back the old genius estimates for the area by over 10,000 years. Interesting side note is that when the water level was high there was not much dry land. Just islands made by the high peaks. So they seem to have eaten more fish than game.
Someplace down that hole they’ll probly find an old Ford factory? Could be where the Egyptians got their enviro friendly chariots?
The real “head exploder” is when one of these digs comes across evidence of domestication of horses in pre-YDI North or South America.
I’m not as in tune to South American geology as North, but north saw immense scour and wash in the YDI impact event/period. Even given that I’m inclined to believe it will eventually be found, and I also believe that one of the prime areas to search for it is in the Basin and Range complex and desert South West.
Like OWB notes, the Basin and Range once sported an inland sea complex probably rivaling or exceeding the size of the one that existed in the Triassic period inland of the east coast lands. At certain periods there had to have been land trade routes through areas of it.
The major obstacle to finding the remains of Human activity in these areas is that areas containing sediments dating in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 BC are for the most part seriously deep and in what is now mostly either the valley Playas or well below the talus/mass wasting debris of the existing mountain range structures.
Any places where Humans congregated outside of these areas around the time of the YDI impacts would either be submerged on the continental shelves or entombed in the resultant submarine alluvial fans (though that period should show easily in fan drill cores as a series of significant pulses of heavily coarse based “fining upward” sequences).