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VINTAGE SKULLS Researcher Silvia Gonzalez examines a 13,000-year-old skull. (Liverpool John Moores University) The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas. Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are...

The Lagoa Santa (or "Luzia") Group (Minas Gerais, Brasil) A skull belonging to a roughly 20 year old woman was unearthed in Brazil by the French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire in the 1970s. She died before being able to do much work on her dicovery. Annette Laming-Emperaire at work in her Lapa Vermelha excavation. The skull was later re-discovered by Brazilian Prof. Walter Neves and analyzed. He also excavated more remains in the same cemetery-like site where the original "Luzia" had been found. Neves named the ancient lady "Luzia" in analogy to the famous and much older African "Lucy" - the...

A Second LookArmed with better technology, archaeologists return to the resting place of North America’s oldest known inhabitant Revisiting the past is never easy, and revisiting an old excavation site on a canyon wall makes for a particularly dicey trip. Especially when it no longer exists. Yet a recent return by scientists to the final resting place of Arlington Springs Woman, the oldest known inhabitant of North America, has provided a striking demonstration of new technology's power to restore the past and preserve it well into the future.SNIP ( click here for entire article) So far, he's obtained 16 dates...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

Findings from a mysterious remote chain of islands off the coast of California are rattling bones in the science community as bone-pickers find traces of a “vanished world.” The Golden State’s Channel Islands, located several miles off the SoCal coast, are home to the remnants of revelational lost civilizations intriguing enough to make Indiana Jones blush. A banner finding in the area has been the 13,000-year-old remains of the “Arlington Springs Man,” the earliest dated adult found on the continent. A new documentary highlighted the extraordinary discovery, which has changed science’s thinking around where and when humans first migrated to...