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The tip of a bone point fragment found embedded in a mastodon rib from an archaeological site in Washington state shows that hunters were present in North America at least 800 years before Clovis, confirming that the first inhabitants arrived earlier to North America than previously thought, says a team of researchers led by a Texas A&M University archaeologist. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, and colleagues from Colorado, Washington and Denmark believe the find at the Manis site in Washington demonstrates that humans were...

In the lowest layer of the Area 15 archaeological grounds at the Gault Site in Central Texas, researchers have unearthed a projectile point technology never previously seen in North America, which they date to be at least 16,000 years old, or a time before Clovis. While clear evidence for the timing of the peopling of the Americas remains elusive, these findings suggest humans occupied North America prior to Clovis - considered one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Paleo-Indian culture of North America, and dated to around 11,000 years ago. In 2002, Area 15 of the Gault Site in...

Science 03 Nov 2017: Vol. 358, Issue 6363, pp. 592-594 DOI: 10.1126/science.aao5473 Article Figures & Data Info & Metrics eLetters PDF You are currently viewing the summary. View Full Text This article has a correction. Please see:Erratum for the Perspective “Finding the first Americans” by T. J. Braje, T. D. Dillehay, J. M. Erlandson, R. G. Klein, T. C. Rick - November 03, 2017 Summary For much of the 20th century, most archaeologists believed humans first colonized the Americas ∼13,500 years ago via an overland route that crossed Beringia and followed a long and narrow, mostly ice-free corridor to the...

Texas Archaeological Dig Challenges Assumptions about First Americans Ancient stone artifacts reveal the day-to-day lives of Clovis people while offering tantalizing clues of an even earlier culture By Elizabeth Lunday Excavations at the Gault site in central Texas. FLORENCE, TEX.—"Look at that—isn't it gorgeous?" Sandy Peck asks as she rinses dirt from a flaked stone about the length and width of a pinky finger. Peck runs a hose over soil on a fine-mesh screen, prodding at stubborn clods of clay with a muddy glove. "Look, there's another one." Peck, sorting soil that had been disturbed by a recent thunderstorm, is...

NEW YORK — A startling new report asserts that the first known Americans arrived much, much earlier than scientists thought — more than 100,000 years ago __ and maybe they were Neanderthals. If true, the finding would far surpass the widely accepted date of about 15,000 years ago. Researchers say a site in Southern California shows evidence of humanlike behavior from about 130,000 years ago, when bones and teeth of an elephantlike mastodon were evidently smashed with rocks. The earlier date means the bone-smashers were not necessarily members of our own species, Homo sapiens. The researchers speculate that these early...

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...

On a rugged bluff overlooking the Ohio River, known locally as "Devil's Backbone," centuries of overgrowth obscures a secret of history... In 1799, early settlers found six skeletons clad in breastplates bearing a Welsh coat of arms. Indian legends told of "yellow-haired giants" who settled in Kentucky, southern Indiana, southern Ohio and Tennessee -- a region they called "the Dark and Forbidden Land." Archeologists debunk the legend. They say that evidence indicates that the natives of the region once conducted a vigorous trading network nearby and buried their dead on the bluff... Upstream about 14 miles from Louisville, Ky., the...

Life came to ice-free Canadian corridor too late to sustain migrations of Clovis and pre-Clovis people. Archaeologists need a new theory for the colonization of the Americas. Plant and animal DNA buried under two Canadian lakes squashes the idea that the first Americans travelled through an ice-free corridor that extended from Alaska to Montana.The analysis, published online in Nature on 10 August and led by palaeo­geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, suggests that the passageway became habitable 12,600 years ago1. That’s nearly 1,000 years after the formation of the Clovis culture — once thought to be the first Americans — and...

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...

Images: Pamela Patrick MAMMOTH HUNTER OR FISH CATCHER? Archaeologists had concluded that the first inhabitants of the New World were fur-clad big-game hunters who swept across the Bering land bridge in pursuit of their prey. But recent evidence suggests that the first settlers may have been just as likely to hunt small game, catch fish or gather plants as they moved through more temperate environments. The leaf-shaped spearpoint I'm holding is surprisingly dainty--for a deadly weapon. I let my mind wander, trying to imagine life some 14,700 years ago in the marshes of southern Chile, where this relic was ...

The cave is cool and damp -- prefect for preserving prehistoric remains, Meachen says. "It's like a refrigerator in there, and probably has been for 20,000 years," she said. "Some of the bones we're finding there have collagen in them. That is where you could get the ancient DNA." The scientists saw bones falling out of a part of the cave, and decided to start digging there. "That was the fossil layer," she said. "There is so much to dig. We have two more years for funding that we can be out there, so we are going to try to...

(Reuters) - Scientists excavating an ancient Wyoming sinkhole containing a rare trove of fossils of Ice Age mammals have unearthed hundreds of bones of such prehistoric animals as American cheetahs, a paleontologist said on Friday. The two-week dig by an international team of researchers led by Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen marked the first exploration of Natural Trap Cave at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming since its initial discovery in the 1970s. Meachen said the extensive excavation that began late last month uncovered roughly 200 large bones of animals like horses that roamed North America...

For the first time in three decades, paleontologists are about to revisit one of North America's most remarkable troves of ancient fossils: The bones of tens of thousands of animals piled at the bottom of a sinkhole-type cave. Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming is 85 feet (25 meters) deep and almost impossible to see until you're standing right next to it. Over tens of thousands of years, many, many animals—including now-extinct mammoths, short-faced bears, American lions and American cheetahs—shared the misfortune of not noticing the 15-foot-wide (4 meters) opening until they were plunging to their deaths. Now, the U.S. Bureau...

Do earthquakes explain all those mastodon bones at Snowmass? Not likely, say scientists, although they haven’t completely shelved the idea. And did humans kill a mammoth 50,000 years ago and then cache the meat for later use? Circumstantial evidence of rocks intermixed with bones suggests that was the case. If so, it would rank as one of the major scientific discoveries of the decade, putting people on the North American continent some 36,000 years earlier than what is now generally agreed upon by archaeologists. That intriguing idea also remains on the shelf, just beyond touch for lack of corroborating evidence.

Rediscovering AmericaThe New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought BY CHARLES W. PETIT Late in the afternoon last May 17, a tired archaeological team neared the end of a 14-hour day winching muck to the deck of a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. It was in water 170 feet deep in Juan Perez Sound, half a mile offshore among British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. For four days, team members had fruitlessly sieved undersea mud and gravel. Then, in the slanting light of sunset, a deckhand drew from the goop a triangular blade of dark basalt. Its sharp edge...

An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age -- 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders, explained that climate changes affecting the North Atlantic ice sheet probably gave rise to periodic overlaps in bear habitats. These overlaps then led to hybridization, or interbreeding -- an event that caused maternal DNA from brown...

The First Americans May Have Come by Water by E. James Dixon If the foragers who created Clovis culture walked into North America, they had to pass through the long-described “ice-free corridor.” But a growing body of evidence indicates that pathway between the great glaciers of the last Ice Age was closed — in fact, the way south may have been blocked until centuries after the dawn of Clovis. If the first Americans could not walk into the New World, how did they get there? Coastal or ocean routes navigated by watercraft are the most likely explanation. No reliably dated ...

Does skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe? By Steve Connor Science Editor 03 December 2002 Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and...

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...