Message #30793

[Bianca]

One of the best sites in North America is the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in southwest Pennsylvania.  As the depths of the shelter were excavated, archaeologists led by James Adovasio of the University of Pittsburgh recovered over 400 stone artifacts from a level dated at 15,000 years ago from charcoal in
a fireplace.  These included slender "bladelike" items similar to those found at European Cro-Magnon sites.  From an even deeper level came a radiocarbon date from a possible basketry fragment of over 17,000 years ago.  Adovasio's work
was published in American Antiquity in 1977.

In an even more recent discovery, reported by Bruce Bower in SCIENCE NEWS in
1986, a rock shelter in Brazil known as the Pedra Furada has been radiocarbon dated to 32,000 years ago.  A hearth in the shelter dated at 17,000 years ago contains a rock with two red painted lines, suggesting that cave art began in Americas about the same time it appeared in Europe and  Africa.  The walls and ceilings of Pedra Furada are still covered with prehistoric paintings.

Other, more controversial sites, argue for even earlier dates.  The Hueyatlaco site in Mexico may be as old as 250,000 years.  Virginia SteenMcIntyre of the U.S. Geological Survey showed in 1981 that layers containing artifacts were 250,000
years old.  A date this old was hard for archaeologists to accept, since it was ten times older than any other date in the Americas.  The debate in the journal QUATERNARY RESEARCH is ongoing.


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