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Texas A&M-led study shows earliest Americans came at least 15,500 years ago

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Akecheta
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« on: March 25, 2011, 10:34:48 pm »

Public release date: 24-Mar-2011
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Contact: Michael Waters
mwaters@tamu.edu
979-845-5246
Texas A&M University
Texas A&M-led study shows earliest American residents came at least 15,500 years ago

COLLEGE STATION, March 24, 2011— New discoveries at a Central Texas archaeological site by a Texas A&M University-led research team prove that people lived in the region far earlier – as much as 2,500 years earlier – than previously believed, rewriting what anthropologists know about when the first inhabitants arrived in North America. That pushes the arrival date back to about 15,500 years ago.

Michael Waters, director of Texas A&M's Center for the Study of First Americans, along with researchers from Baylor University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and Texas State University, have found the oldest archaeological evidence for human occupation in Texas and North America at the Debra L.

Friedkin site, located about 40 miles northwest of Austin. Their work is published in the current issue of Science magazine.
Waters says that buried in deposits next to a small spring-fed stream is a record of human occupation spanning the last 15,500 years. Near the surface is the record of the Late Prehistoric and Archaic occupants of the region. Buried deeper in the soil are layers with Folsom and Clovis occupations going back 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.

"But the kicker was the discovery of nearly 16,000 artifacts below the Clovis horizon that dated to 15,500 years ago," Waters notes.

"Most of these are chipping debris from the making and resharpening of tools, but over 50 are tools. There are bifacial artifacts that tell us they were making projectile points and knives at the site," Waters says. There are expediently made tools and blades that were used for cutting and scraping."

Multiple studies have shown that the site is undisturbed and that the artifacts are in place and over 60 "luminescence dates" show that early people arrived at the site by 15,500 years ago, Waters explains. Luminescence dating technique is a method used to date the sediment surrounding the artifacts. It dates the last time the sediment was exposed to sunlight.

For more than 80 years, it has been argued that the Clovis people were the first to enter the Americas, Waters says. He goes on to say that over the last few decades, there have been several credible sites which date older than Clovis found in North America -- specifically in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Oregon.

"However, this evidence is not very robust," Waters observes.

"What is special about the Debra L. Friedkin site is that it has the largest number of artifacts dating to the pre-Clovis time period, that these artifacts show an array of different technologies, and that these artifacts date to a very early time.

"This discovery challenges us to re-think the early colonization of the Americas. There's no doubt these tools and weapons are human-made and they date to about 15,500 years ago, making them the oldest artifacts found both in Texas and North America."

Waters has been working at the site since 2006, and analysis of the artifacts collected from the site is ongoing. Waters says, "These studies will help us figure out where these people came from, how they adapted to the new environments they encountered, and understand the origins of later groups like Clovis."

###

Funding for the project was provided by the North Star Archaeological Research Program and the Chair in First American Studies.

For more about the Center for the Study of the First Americans, go to http://csfa.tamu.edu/

Contact: Michael Waters at (979) 845-5246 or mwaters@tamu.edu, Blair Williamson, College of Liberal Arts, at (979) 458-1347 or bwilliamson@libarts.tamu.edu or Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or keith-randall@tamu.edu
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/tau-tas032111.php

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Akecheta
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« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2011, 10:36:44 pm »

Texas find suggests early-human camp
Discovery may be earliest evidence of man in N. America

16 comments by Roy Wenzl - Mar. 25, 2011 12:00 AM
McClatchy Newspapers

COLLEGE STATION, Texas - Scientists along Buttermilk Creek north of Austin, Texas, have found flint knife blades, chisels and other human artifacts lying in a soil layer nearly 16,000 years old - a discovery they say will rewrite a major chapter of ancient human history.

For one thing, it is now the oldest and arguably most credible site of human occupation in North or South America; but there's more.

The discovery, by Texas A&M archaeologist Michael Waters and others, pushes back by 2,500 years the time when traditional science thought humans entered the New World from Siberia and founded the native peoples of North and South America.

"This discovery ought to be like a baseball bat to the side of the head," to past theories, Waters said.

Other ancient sites in the Americas usually produce only handfuls of artifacts, in soils with ages that scientists argue about. This site contained tools in layer after layer of soils stacked like layer cake, the youngest from modern times, the oldest layer containing 15,000 artifacts dated to 15,500 years ago.

The discovery strengthens the case for two theories that traditional archaeologists laughed at not long ago - that the first Americans came earlier than 13,000 years ago, and that they didn't walk over a land bridge into North America from Siberia, but came by skin boats at least 16,000 years ago (or long before) skirting along coastlines of the Aleutian Islands and then Alaska, Canada and America.

Waters believes they came by boat, hunting seals beside Ice Age glaciers a few miles at a time, surviving Ice Age weather, bringing families and pet dogs.

He thinks the first colonies in America sprouted tens of thousands of years ago along the Columbia River basin between Washington and Oregon, a region he said archaeologists should re-explore with renewed vigor.

This story is important to all of us, he said; most Americans think Columbus should be taught in schools; but the first discovery of America was more heroic than his voyage, and far older. It's a story that Waters and other scientists have spent decades trying to get right, including with dig sites in Kansas.

The first Americans, or Paleo Indians, were the first to explore the Rockies and Andes, the Mississippi, the Amazon. They were first to see giant elephants and bison roaming Ice Age Kansas. They dodged everything from giant Dire wolves, giant short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, and American lions.

They took heroic risks - hunted elephants with spears, at arms' length; taste-tested possibly lethal plants to find which were good as food or medicine; hunted with grannies and children not only coming along but driving herds into hunter ambushes.

"One thought that deeply touches my sense of wonder is that they didn't really have to migrate once they got here," Waters said. "Everywhere they would go, they'd find a land empty of people, with huge amounts of resources. And yet they migrated all the way to the tip of South America, and the only explanation is the relentless human spirit of adventure. And they were bringing not only their wives and elderly but their pregnant wives and their babies."

The tools found in Texas are flint blades small and thin, designed by people who carried everything they owned. It is likely that flint tools made up only 5 percent or so of the belongings of these people.

Many of the tools are cutting blades used to whittle and shape bone and wood; there were no distinct spear points.

Waters thinks the Buttermilk people used the stone tools to make spear points from bone. Some tools had notches with convex edges - carving tools; some chisels had edges dulled from scraping hard surfaces.

One artifact gave Waters a thrill when found: a golf-ball-size nodule of hematite, worn flat on several sides the way schoolroom chalk wears flat. Hematite when mixed with animal and plant oils produces red ochre - paint to adorn spear shafts, clothing - or skin.

"These people from 15,500 years ago were decorating themselves," he said.

Rolfe Mandel, a geoarchaeologist with the Kansas Geological Survey who has discovered important sites in Kansas, said the Texas discovery is "a very big deal," in part because it strengthens the possibility that humans entered the New World as early as 24,000 years ago, near the peak rather than at the end of the last Ice Age.

Waters said he would not go that far; ("I can confirm only that they were here at least by 15,500 years ago.")

But Mandel and some geneticists say the evidence is growing.

Twenty-four thousand years ago would have been scoffed at by scientists only a few years ago. They believed people could not have come until 13,000 years ago.

The Texas discovery upends that, Mandel said. People didn't just enter Alaska and sprint with babies to Texas; (or to Monte Verde, a site in southern Chile dated at 14,500 years). They migrated, perhaps for centuries.

Mandel analyzed Waters' discovery paper for Science magazine, which reported it Thursday.

He said Waters found overwhelming evidence in a field of study where that almost never happens. Ancient Americans were so few, and created so few belongings that survived decay that most camp or hunting sites contain only a few flint flakes. But Waters found thousands of artifacts in excavation blocks only about 50 meters square.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/03/25/20110325ancient-texasartifacts0325.html
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