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On a rugged island just offshore from Ventura County, archaeologists have turned up evidence of some of the oldest human activity in coastal Southern California. On Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, researchers have found three sites scattered with ancient tool-making debris and the shells of harvested shellfish. The youngest of the three sites has been dated to 6,600 BCE, but based on the types of tools found at the other two, archaeologists say they may be as much as 11,000 to 12,000 years old. The artifacts are traces of what's known as the Island Paleocoastal culture,...

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...