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The discovery of stone tools found in a Florida river show that humans settled the southeastern United States far earlier than previously believed—perhaps by as much as 1,500 years, according to a team of scientists that includes a University of Michigan paleontologist.

The geology of the site, as well as pollen and algae finds, suggest that the hunter-gatherers encountered the mastodon next to a small pond that both humans and animals used as a water source, the researchers believe. Waters said that the prehistoric "people knew how to find game, fresh water and materials for making tools. These people were well adapted to this environment. The site is a slam-dunk pre-Clovis site with unequivocal artifacts, clear stratigraphy and thorough dating." Another research team previously excavated the site and found what they believed were dog remains, so dogs "would most likely have been...

Radiocarbon dating of a prehistoric archeological site in Florida suggests that 14,550 years ago, hunter-gatherers, possibly accompanied by dogs, butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a small pond. The findings, based on a four-year study of the Page-Ladson archaeological site in the Aucilla River, about 45 minutes from Tallahassee, Florida, provide a rare glimpse of the earliest human occupation in the southeastern United States, and offer clues to the timing of the disappearance of large animals like the mastodon and camel that roamed the American Southeast during the Late Pleistocene. Additionally, the artifacts at Page-Ladson highlight that much of...

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...