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The Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points, likely were not the first humans in the Americas, according to research placing their presence as more recent than previously believed. Using advanced radiocarbon dating techniques, researchers writing in the journal Science on Thursday said the Clovis people, hunters of large Ice Age animals like mammoths and mastodons, dated from about 13,100 to 12,900 years ago. That would make the Clovis culture, known from artifacts discovered at various sites including the town of Clovis, New Mexico, both younger and shorter-lived than previously thought. Previous estimates had dated the culture to about...

Who were the first people in North America? From where did they come? How did they arrive? The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever seen by over five millennia. The accepted version of the first Americans starts with a flint spearhead unearthed at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1933. Dated by the mammoth...

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World. A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60...

ST. LOUIS—The first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The tools don’t match Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little...

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...

The Smithsonian archaeologist pursuing the contentious claim that ancient Europeans fleeing the Ice Age settled in America says artifacts unearthed in the Chesapeake Bay region support his theory. Smithsonian Institution curator of archaeology Dennis Stanford argues that about 18,000 years ago, Solutrean hunters from the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal followed seals and other marine mammals for their fur, food and fuel across a partially frozen north Atlantic Ocean to the New World... "Pre-Clovis is a fact in North and South America," archaeologist Michael Collins of the University of Texas at Austin said this year at a symposium on...

The stone tools discovered by the team were similar to what Dillehay had previously found at Monte Verde. Many were simple unifacial tools -- meaning they were worked on only one side of the stone, to create a sharp edge -- though some of the younger tools and projectile points indicate bifacial technologies... The bones tended to be small fragments, broken and scorched, indicating that the animals had been cooked. They often came from very large animals, like prehistoric llamas or mastodons, as well as smaller creatures like prehistoric deer and horses. The Monte Verde site was unlikely to have...

South Carolina dig could move habitation date back another 12,000 years.

All early American ancestors hailed from East Asia and Siberia? Not so fast, says a prominent scientist... Stanford shows me some other artifacts. In addition to bifacial spear points, there are bone points, spear throwers, bow drills, hammerstones, scrapers, and flat stones that still retain traces of birch sap, which may have been used to apply waterproof seals to their boats. “Everything the Solutreans had, they have here,” Stanford explains. “Of course, that’s just coincidence.” Then he laughs that infectious laugh of his... Stanford opens another drawer and shows some spear points recovered from Tennessee. The points are over 14,000...

Original Texans? Austin-area find adds to debate over early man By ERIC BERGER Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Science Writer The verdant Central Texas cove was Shangri-La for people living 13,000 years ago. Fed by permanent springs, the area between the Edwards Plateau and lower coastal plains offered ample game from both ecosystems, and its limestone held an abundant supply of flint-like rock, or chert, ideal for making Stone Age tools. "This is an absolutely special place," University of Texas archaeologist Michael Collins said as he recently surveyed the rolling ground occasionally pockmarked by meticulously terraced digs. It's special in bounty ...

In a grassy meadow where eons ago some of America's first settlers camped and chipped stone tools, a precisely dug dirt pit, four yards square, is sinking steadily into the dark soil. And as it descends at a rate of an inch or two a day, the remote excavation northwest of Austin is also traveling backward through the millennia toward the continent's first native people... If all goes well, perhaps quite soon, primitive stone tools, similar to those discovered here a few years ago, will again be unearthed, reinforcing an emerging, if once controversial theory, about when the first humans...

Contact: Dr. Dolores Pipernopipernod@tivoli.si.edu 011-507-212-8101Smithsonian Institution An origin of new world agriculture in coastal Ecuador New archaeological evidence points to an independent origin of agriculture in coastal Ecuador 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Suddenly, the remains of larger squash plants appear in the record. The Las Vegas site, described by Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and Karen Stothert, University of Texas at Austin in the February 14th issue of Science, may predate plant domestication sites in the Mesoamerican highlands. The fertile and amazingly diverse lowland tropics seem like a likely place for agriculture to develop. But...

It is often held aloft by environmental campaign groups as an example of one of the last remaining regions of unspoiled habitat left in the world. But instead of being a pristine rainforest untouched by human hands, the Amazon appears to have been profoundly shaped by mankind. An international team of researchers have published evidence that suggests the Amazon was once home to millions of people who lived and farmed in the area now covered by trees.

It is often held aloft by environmental campaign groups as an example of one of the last remaining regions of unspoiled habitat left in the world. But instead of being a pristine rainforest untouched by human hands, the Amazon appears to have been profoundly shaped by mankind. An international team of researchers have published evidence that suggests the Amazon was once home to millions of people who lived and farmed in the area now covered by trees.

Carson and his colleagues wanted to explore the question of whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia, where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites. These sediment cores hold ancient pollen grains and charcoal from long-ago fires, and can hint at the climate and ecosystem that existed when the sediment was laid down as far back as 6,000 years ago. An examination of the two cores — one from the large lake, Laguna Oricore, and one from the smaller lake, Laguna Granja — revealed a...

Look around the Amazon rainforest today and it’s hard to imagine it filled with people. But in recent decades, archaeologists have started to find evidence that before Columbus’s arrival, the region was dotted with towns and perhaps even cities. The extent of human settlement in the Amazon remains hotly debated, partly because huge swaths of the 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest remain unstudied by archaeologists. Now, researchers have built a model predicting where signs of pre-Columbian agriculture are most likely to be found, a tool they hope will help guide future archaeological work in the region. In many ways, archaeology in the Amazon...

Previously unknown archeological sites in forest islands reveal human presence in the western Amazon as early as 10,000 years ago, according to research published August 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Umberto Lombardo from the University of Bern, Switzerland and colleagues from other institutions. The study focuses on a region in the Bolivian Amazon thought to be rarely occupied by pre-agricultural communities due to unfavorable environmental conditions. Hundreds of 'forest islands'- small forested mounds of earth- are found throughout the region, their origins attributed to termites, erosion or ancient human activity. In this study, the authors report...

A series of ancient underwater etchings has been uncovered near the jungle city of Manaus, following a drought in the Brazilian Amazon. The previously submerged images -- engraved on rocks and possibly up to 7,000 years old -- were reportedly discovered by a fisherman after the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river, fell to its lowest level in more than 100 years last month... Though water levels are now rising again, partly covering the apparently stone age etchings, local researchers photographed them before they began to disappear under the river's dark waters. Archaeologists who have studied the photographs...

Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered. However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte... George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes....

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that...