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15,000 years ago, humans camped in a lush Texas valley, leaving thousands of artifacts behind, from tools to face paint. This could be definitive proof that ancient people arrived in America by boat, not by walking the Bering Strait. Anthropologist Michael Waters and colleagues announced their findings today, detailing the almost 16,000 artifacts they found near Buttermilk Creek, outside the Austin area. Their discovery will change everything you thought you knew about how people arrived in the Americas. Meet the Buttermilk Creek people What's remarkable is that this places human occupation of America over 2,000 years earlier than previously believed....

Catastrophic Flooding from Ancient Lake May Have Triggered Cold Period CLIMATE CHANGE, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION, JEFF DONNELLY, ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE Newswise — Imagine a lake three times the size of the present-day Lake Ontario breaking through a dam and flooding down the Hudson River Valley past New York City and into the North Atlantic. The results would be catastrophic if it happened today, but it did happen some 13,400 years ago during the retreat of glaciers over North America and may have triggered a brief cooling known as the Intra-Allerod Cold Period. Assistant Scientist Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods...

An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age -- 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders, explained that climate changes affecting the North Atlantic ice sheet probably gave rise to periodic overlaps in bear habitats. These overlaps then led to hybridization, or interbreeding -- an event that caused maternal DNA from brown...

An extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago wiped out mammoths and started a mini-ice age, scientists believe Margaret Munro CanWest News Service Monday, May 14, 2007 A comet or some other extraterrestrial object appears to have slammed into northern Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered an abrupt and catastrophic climate change that wiped out the mammoths and many other prehistoric creatures, according to a team of U.S. scientists. Evidence of the ecological disaster exists in a thin layer of sediment that has been found from Alberta to New Mexico, say the researchers, whose work adds a dramatic and provocative twist to...

In this companion Web site to the NOVA program Mystery of the Megaflood, explore the Channeled Scabland through an interactive map, read an interview with geologist Vic Baker, take a geology quiz, visit our teacher's guide, and more... Mystery of the Megaflood: What unleashed a catastrophic flood that scarred thousands of square miles in the American Northwest? Airs on PBS September 20, 2005... Airs on PBS May 16, 2006.

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research.....

Stone Age Columbus - questions and answersWhat was the Ice Age climate like in southern France/Spain? During the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago the climate was a lot colder and drier than now. In southern France one could expect summer temperatures of between 5-10°C and winter temperatures dropping below -20°C. Even so, there were three basic land types that had their own advantages and disadvantages for people: Wide coastal plain that was probably an open grass land with sparse vegetation Uplands that would have been much like the Arctic tundra today Inland valleys that were well sheltered and...

Skulls found in Mexico suggest the early Americans would have said 'G'day mate' By Steve Connor, Science Editor 04 September 2003 The accepted theory of how prehistoric humans first migrated to America has been challenged by a study of an ancient set of bones unearthed in Mexico. An analysis of 33 skulls found on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California suggests that the first Americans were not north Asians who crossed to the American continent about 12,000 years ago. The skulls more closely resemble the present-day natives of Australia and the South Pacific, suggesting that there might have been an...

<p>An archaeological site in Siberia, long thought to be the original jumping-off point for crossing the Bering land bridge into North America, is actually much younger than previously believed, shaking the theory that the first Americans migrated overland during the final cold snap of the last great ice age.</p>

As elusive as the Cheshire Cat, the first people to arrive in the Americas have tended to appear and vanish with each new twist in the archaeological record. The latest disappearing act may be taking place on page 501, where new evidence, some claim, casts another shadow over a once-cherished idea: that Asian big-game hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge to give rise to the Clovis people, who were considered the first Americans. New dates show that a crucial Siberian site, thought to be a way station along the Bering road, wasn't occupied until after the Clovis had begun killing...

Discover Feb, 1999 First Americans.(origins of man) Author/s: Karen Wright Not long ago we thought the first humans in the New World were mammoth hunters from Siberia who crossed the Bering Strait at the end of the Ice Age. Now, we are learning, none of that may be true not the who, not the where, not the how, and certainly not the when. You don't expect someone who has been dead for more than 9,000 years to have any odor left--let alone a strong one. But you don't expect him to have any hair or skin or clothes left, either,...

'First Americans' may be Johnnies-come-lately By MIKE TONER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 08/20/04 Human history is being written —and rewritten — a shovelful at a time on a shaded hillside along the Savannah River. Each summer Al Goodyear's team of archaeologists digs deeper into the riverbank in South Carolina's Allendale County. Each summer the story of the first Americans, the primitive hunters who first populated the continent, grows longer. And more complex. And more controversial. David Tulis/AJC (ENLARGE) Archaeologist Al Goodyear holds a hand-made 'microblade,' one of the hundreds of artifacts unearthed during his team's seven years of excavations...

Rediscovering AmericaThe New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought BY CHARLES W. PETIT Late in the afternoon last May 17, a tired archaeological team neared the end of a 14-hour day winching muck to the deck of a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. It was in water 170 feet deep in Juan Perez Sound, half a mile offshore among British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. For four days, team members had fruitlessly sieved undersea mud and gravel. Then, in the slanting light of sunset, a deckhand drew from the goop a triangular blade of dark basalt. Its sharp edge...

Immigrants from the Other Side? According to the Clovis-First theory, for decades the gospel preached by authorities on the peopling of the Americas, the first Americans walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago, and after finding a corridor through the Cordilleran Ice Sheet--admittedly it wasn't an easy trip and the timing was tricky--descended into temperate North America. We know them by their classic fluted points, unlike any others in the world, they left at campsites on their journey south to populate Central and South America. [~ 45:l ~] There have been variations of the basic...

Years of research in eastern Asia and Alaska have produced little evidence of any historical or technological connection between the Asian Paleolithic (Stone Age) and Clovis peoples. Also, the southeastern United States has produced more Clovis sites than the West, and a few radiocarbon dates suggest some of them may predate those in the western states. If correct, that hardly fits the notion that Clovis technology originated in northeast Asia or Alaska. Over the years, various scholars have noted similarities between Clovis projectile points and "Solutrean" points, the product of a Paleolithic culture on the north coast of Spain between...

IBERIA, NOT SIBERIA?A Look at the Evidence Supporting a Late Pleistocene Migration to the New World from Europe Michael A. Arbuthnot ANT 5152 Paleoindian Archaeology Dr. Michael Faught December 6th, 2000 Perhaps the most provocative question facing North American paleo-archaeologists is the origin of the Clovis complex. Traditional models have placed Clovis origins in Asia, though one controversial theory contends that Clovis progenitors may have migrated from Iberia (Spain, France, and Portugal). This theory suggests that the descendants of an Upper Pleistocene culture known as Solutrean were the first unquestionable inhabitants of the New World. The recent revitalization of a...

Special Report 2/23/04 Island Hopping To A New World The first Americans may have arrived not on foot but by boat from Asia, even Europe By Alex Markels Digging in a dank limestone cave in Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands last summer, 21-year-old Christina Heaton hardly noticed the triangular piece of chipped stone she'd unearthed in a pile of muddy debris. But as her scientist father, Timothy, sifted through the muck, he realized she'd struck pay dirt. "Oh my God!" he yelled to her and the team of other researchers scouring the remote site off the coast of British Columbia. "It's...

Constructing the Solutrean Solution Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley Smithsonian Institution University of Exeter At the 1999 Clovis and Beyond Conference held in Santa Fe, we presented a hypothesis, now known as the "Solutrean Solution", to explain the origin of Clovis technology. The hypothesis is based on the fact that there is little commonality between Clovis and Northeast Asian technologies on the one hand, while on the other, there are many technological traits shared between Clovis and the Solutrean culture of Paleolithic Europe. In the past, scholars have rejected the idea of a historical connection between the two cultures because...

An Italian historian has unveiled a previously unknown document that sheds fresh light on explorer John Cabot’s discovery of Canada — a brief entry in a 516-year-old accounting ledger that shows Cabot had financial backing from a Florence-based bank in England and, most intriguingly, may have had prior knowledge of the distant land his famous 1497 voyage would put on the world map. The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears...