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About 23,000 years ago, a group of children and teenagers left footprints along Lake Otero in what is now southern New Mexico – perhaps they were fetching water for adults hunting a mammoth or the massive ground sloth that roamed the area in those days. This week, a team of researchers from White Sands National Park, the National Parks Service and others published an article in the journal Science, which concludes that those children’s footprints were the oldest known human tracks ever found in North America. Imprints of the tiny toes were found along outcrops of the since-dried-up lake, which...

The footprints at White Sands were dated by examining the seeds of an aquatic plant that once thrived along the shores of the dried-up lake, Ruppia cirrhosa, commonly known as ditchgrass. According to research published Thursday in the journal Science and co-authored by Bustos, the ancient ditchgrass seeds were found in layers of hard earth both above and below the many human footprints at the site, and they were radiocarbon-dated to determine their age. The tracks at one location have been revealed as both the earliest known footprints and the oldest firm evidence of humans anywhere in the Americas, showing...

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. Ancient human footprints preserved in the ground across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are astonishingly old, scientists reported on Thursday, dating back about 23,000 years to the Ice Age.The results, if they hold up to scrutiny, would rejuvenate the scientific debate about how humans first spread across the Americas, implying that they did so at a time when massive glaciers covered much of their path.Researchers who have argued for such...

New radiocarbon dates for rabbit bones excavated in the 1960s at Mexico’s Coxcatlan Cave (shown here) raise the possibility that humans lived there roughly 30,000 years ago. Andrew D. Somerville Humans may have inhabited what’s now southern Mexico surprisingly early, between 33,448 and 28,279 years ago, researchers say. If so, those people arrived more than 10,000 years before folks often tagged as the first Americans (SN: 7/11/18). Other preliminary evidence puts humans in central Mexico as early as around 33,000 years ago (SN: 7/22/20). The latest evidence comes from animal bones that biological anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Somerville and...

Bye Bye, Beringia Anthropology and Archaeology of The Americas by Bill Jones One might think that Archeology sites throughout the World have produced many datable human remains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ancient human remains have so rarely been found that these singular findings could not be connected to others to form chronologies about human evolution. The scarcity of human remains to be analyzed has prevented the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology from forming conclusions about the cultural levels of ancient humans. We try to measure the culture of a people in terms of the totality of their...

VINTAGE SKULLS Researcher Silvia Gonzalez examines a 13,000-year-old skull. (Liverpool John Moores University) The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas. Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are...

Calico: A 200,000-year old site in the Americas? New World archaeological sites inferred to be even slightly older than the 11.5 ka Clovis complexes have been controversial; so claims for a 200 ka site in North America have heretofore been treated with substantial disdain. But the acceptance of Monte Verde and Diring may soon change that. The classic "ancient site" in the New World is "Calico," located in the Central Mojave Desert of California (Shlemon and Budinger, 1990). Two issues have dogged acceptance of Calico by mainstream archaeologists: (1) the authenticity of the artifacts; are they truly the product of ...

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 ...

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Anthony Watts WUWT readers may recall this recent story: New evidence of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact The story below provides much more detail about the Younger Dryas event and the split that has developed in the scientific community over the cause. I’ve added this graph below from NCDC to give readers a sense of time and magnitude of the event. – Anthony The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. From:Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 19, Issues 1-5, 1 January 2000, Richard B. AlleyGuest Post By: Rodney Chilton www.bcclimate.com A consideration of many...

Americas Settled 15,000 Years Ago, Study Says Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic NewsMarch 13, 2008 A consensus is emerging in the highly contentious debate over the colonization of the Americas, according to a study that says the bulk of the region wasn't settled until as late as 15,000 years ago. Researchers analyzed both archaeological and genetic evidence from several dozen sites throughout the Americas and eastern Asia for the paper. "In the past archaeologists haven't paid too much attention to molecular genetic evidence," said lead author Ted Goebel, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "We have brought...

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...

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 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...

Penon WomanPenon WomanScientists 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 Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it...

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...

Years of research in eastern Asia and Alaska have produced little evidence of any historical or technological connection between the Asian Paleolithic (Stone Age) and Clovis peoples. Also, the southeastern United States has produced more Clovis sites than the West, and a few radiocarbon dates suggest some of them may predate those in the western states. If correct, that hardly fits the notion that Clovis technology originated in northeast Asia or Alaska. Over the years, various scholars have noted similarities between Clovis projectile points and "Solutrean" points, the product of a Paleolithic culture on the north coast of Spain between...

Special Report 2/23/04 Island Hopping To A New World The first Americans may have arrived not on foot but by boat from Asia, even Europe By Alex Markels Digging in a dank limestone cave in Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands last summer, 21-year-old Christina Heaton hardly noticed the triangular piece of chipped stone she'd unearthed in a pile of muddy debris. But as her scientist father, Timothy, sifted through the muck, he realized she'd struck pay dirt. "Oh my God!" he yelled to her and the team of other researchers scouring the remote site off the coast of British Columbia. "It's...

IBERIA, NOT SIBERIA?A Look at the Evidence Supporting a Late Pleistocene Migration to the New World from Europe Michael A. Arbuthnot ANT 5152 Paleoindian Archaeology Dr. Michael Faught December 6th, 2000 Perhaps the most provocative question facing North American paleo-archaeologists is the origin of the Clovis complex. Traditional models have placed Clovis origins in Asia, though one controversial theory contends that Clovis progenitors may have migrated from Iberia (Spain, France, and Portugal). This theory suggests that the descendants of an Upper Pleistocene culture known as Solutrean were the first unquestionable inhabitants of the New World. The recent revitalization of a...

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...

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, ...