Texas find suggests early-human campDiscovery 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
