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There are two reasons, according to Jim Adovasio, we don’t think of baskets or textiles when we think of the Stone Age. One is that stones and bones, being far more durable, are far more common at archeological sites than artifacts made of fiber... And yet it has been around a long time, as four small pieces of clay described by Adovasio this past year make clear. Found at a site called Pavlov in the Czech Republic, they are 27,000 years old--and impressed with patterns that could only have been created by woven fibers. These artifacts push back the date...

Prehistoric humans began gravitating to the Gault Site about 16,000 years ago, Texas State researchers say. The Gault Site is preserved forever because an archaeologist bought it and gave it to a conservation group... [Few academics have such wherewithal and fewer still would spend it this way, said Tom Dillehay, an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University.] You can hardly walk 10 steps along Buttermilk Creek about 45 miles north of Austin without finding evidence that people lived here thousands of years ago. The ground is littered with flakes of chert, a plentiful stone from which projectile points, blades, cleavers and...

The discovery demonstrates the presence of an ancient human population in America's Far West at the end of the last ice age. It was found that human coprolites were of Siberia-east Asian origins and is between 13,000 and 13,200 years old. The findings also confirmed that these fossilized samples were a thousand years older than the Clovis civilization, Paleo-Indian people who were used to reside in New Mexico around 11,500 years ago. Jenkins's work at the site began in 2002, but archaeologists first began exploring the caves as early as 1938. He said, "As we have used increasingly sophisticated scientific...

Ancient stone projectile points and fossilized feces suggest a previously unknown culture that existed on the West Coast some 13,000 years ago. Ancient stone projectile points discovered in a Central Oregon cave complex have cast new light on the identity of the first Americans. ~~~snip~~~ These stone points, a type known as Western temmed points, are narrower and lack the distinctive flute, or shallow groove, found on Clovis points. Researchers believe the two types of points represent different technologies, produced by different cultures....

<p>Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?</p> <p>Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday.</p> <p>The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.</p>

For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate. Until now, they have found nothing conclusive-arrowheads, baskets, animal bones and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake, but is now a sagebrush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin. But a few years ago, University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his students...

Ore. Discovery Challenges Beliefs About First Humans Until recently, most scientists believed that the first humans came to the Americas 13,000 years ago. But new archaeological findings from a cave in Oregon are challenging that assumption. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Television reports on the controversial discovery. LEE HOCHBERG, NewsHour correspondent: What archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found in the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon may turn on its head the theory of how and when the first people came to North America. Many scientists believe humans first came to this continent 13,000 years ago across a land bridge from Asia...

Finding Pre-Clovis Humans in the Oregon High Desert An interview with Dennis Jenkins See Interview About Dennis Jenkins In this interview, conducted at Paisley Five Mile Point Caves on June 13, 2007, by Rick Pettigrew of ALI, Dr. Dennis Jenkins describes the remarkable discovery of human DNA in coprolites dated between 14,000 and 15,000 calibrated years ago. This evidence, reported in the 3 April 2008, issue of the journal Science, strongly supports the proposition that human migrants to North America arrived at least 1000 years before the widespread Clovis complex appeared. The data also support the conclusion that the first...

New evidence shows humans lived in North America more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than had previously been known. Discovered in a cave in Oregon, fossil feces yielded DNA indicating these early residents were related to people living in Siberia and East Asia, according to a report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science. "This is the first time we have been able to get dates that are undeniably human, and they are 1,000 years before Clovis," said Dennis L. Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, referring to the Clovis culture, well known for its unique spear-points...

Hold the potty humor, please, but archaeologists digging in a dusty cave in Oregon have unearthed fossilized feces that appear to be oldest biological evidence of humans in North America. The ancient poop dates back 14,300 years. If the results hold up, that means the continent was populated more than 1,000 years before the so-called Clovis culture, long believed to be the first Americans. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that the human presence in the Americas predates Clovis," said Michael Waters, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the project. DNA analysis of...

Page Updated: Monday, April 12, 2004 1:28 PM PDT Archaeologist talks about Oregon's early natives Dr. Dennis Jenkins believes the entire Sumner Lake Basin was once filled with water up to state Highway 31. Contributed Photo By Daniel Schreiber, Staff Writer Were humans present 12,000 years ago in the Great Basin region of Oregon when buffalo, non-Spanish horses and even camels roamed the landscape? This, the central question of University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins' series of digs, is what researchers have been trying to determine since the 1930s. In 1938, Luther Cressman, the first to explore the region, discovered...

Aug. 9, 2002, 10:45AM BONING UP ON HISTORYSkeletal remains may be 11,000 years old By TERRY KLIEWER Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle LAKE JACKSON -- The gummy clay of coastal Texas holds plenty of secrets, but it may have given up one of its oldest when routine excavation near here uncovered prehistoric human bones. John Everett / Chronicle Archaeologist Robert d'Aigle unearthed bones three years ago in the San Bernard River National Wildlife Refuge in south Brazoria County. He may have found only the third human skeleton in North America that dates back at least 10,000 years. The bones -- a...

Beringia: humans were hereIt was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people. ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Gazette Published: Saturday, May 17 Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent. This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving...

OK, You pick: Depiction by a renowned forensic scientist, or hideous, androgenous, mix-mash cartoon, pandering to the unrelated Northwest Natives? Or.. IMHO: Time should be ashamed. (not that it would ever happen, mind you.)

Impossibly Old America? Volume 59 Number 3, May/June 2006 by Mike Toner New sites and controversial theories fuel the debate over the origins of America's first people. Archaeologist Al Goodyear believes people were at South Carolina's Topper site 50,000 years ago. (Mike Toner) Al Goodyear's renowned barbecued pig is roasting on the grill a mile away, but the 200 professional and amateur archaeologists peering into the steep-walled pit where he's standing have other things on their minds. Goodyear, director of the University of South Carolina's Allendale Paleoindian Expedition, is explaining why he thinks people were here--on the banks of the...

Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis Barbara van Asch et al. Dogs were present in pre-Columbian America, presumably brought by early human migrants from Asia. Studies of free-ranging village/street dogs have indicated almost total replacement of these original dogs by European dogs, but the extent to which Arctic, North and South American breeds are descendants of the original population remains to be assessed. Using a comprehensive phylogeographic analysis, we traced the origin of the mitochondrial DNA lineages for Inuit, Eskimo and Greenland dogs, Alaskan Malamute, Chihuahua, xoloitzcuintli and...

'First Americans were Australian' This is the face of the first known American, Lucia The first Americans were descended from Australian aborigines, according to evidence in a new BBC documentary. The skulls suggest faces like those of Australian aborigines The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later massacred by invaders from Asia. Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and...

Projectile points look old, old, oldSecond site - Archaeologists suspect fluted obsidian tools date almost to the last ice age Wednesday, September 05, 2007RICHARD L. HILL The Oregonian Staff Archaeologists working in south-central Oregon's sagebrush steppes have found signs of some of the region's earliest inhabitants. Researchers from the University of Oregon and U.S. Bureau of Land Management have uncovered four fluted projectile points and related artifacts at a remote site near Riley. The obsidian points could be 12,000 years old, but the archaeologists are being cautious about giving an exact age until they're able to obtain radiocarbon dates from...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

The First Americans By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr Newsweek, April 26, 1999 New digs and old bones reveal an ancient land that was a mosaic of peoples—including Asians and Europeans. Now a debate rages: who got here first? 'Skull wars:' Facial reconstruction of the 'Spirit Cave Man,' based on bones found in Spirit Cave, Churchill County, Nevada (David Barry--Courtesy Nevada State Museum; facial reconstruction by Sharon Long) As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple...