ALLENDALE, S.C. (AP) - Some chipped tools and stone flakes found on a hill above a remote and wooded stretch of the Savannah River may show humans arrived in America about 3,000 years earlier than first thought.
Researchers have generally accepted that the first humans came to America as primitive hunters from Asia 12,000 years ago. But the South Carolina finds are the latest evidence that the continent was inhabited 15,000 years ago, well before the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago, archaeologists say.
"It is now reasonable to think of humans living on this landscape perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 years ago," said University of South Carolina archaeologist Albert Goodyear, who is helping to excavate the site. "It's the dawn of a new chapter in what was already a good book."
Coupled with mounting evidence of early human activity from scattered locations including a gravel pit in Virginia, a cave in Pennsylvania and a bog in Chile, the stone tools excavated in South Carolina suggest that human populations were spread across both continents 15,000 years ago.
Last year, a University of Oklahoma archaeologist suggested some broken stone tools found in the northwestern part of the state could be at least 22,000 years old.
The sites are so far apart that the earliest visitors could only have arrived earlier than once thought, or reached the Americas by more than one route, some researches theorize.
Goodyear and his team of archaeologists first uncovered the tools three years ago along a section of the river in Allendale County owned by Clariant, a Swiss-based chemical company.
Microscopic analysis of the stone chips confirmed that they could only have been created by human activity. The area may have served as a sort of workshop, where prehistoric people made the implements they needed for working wood and scraping animal hides.
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