Pushing Back the Date

There’s a pair of interesting news stories, each of which pushes back the date of human habitation of the North American continent. The site Nature, apparently taking most of its information from an article in Science, reports on artifacts and remains found in Oregon which pushes the date back to at least 14,000 years ago:

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone’s age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon.

His team found the tool in a rock shelter overlooking a lake in south-central Oregon, one of a series of caves near the town of Paisley.

However, a find in Pennsylvania may push the date back even farther:

On November 12th 1955, as Albert Miller took a walk through his Pennsylvania property, named Meadowcroft, he noticed a freshly dug groundhog hole. Upon seeing the disturbed earth, the amateur archaeologist saw a chance to confirm his theory that Native Americans once lived on his land. He expanded the hole until he found evidence to support his theory. Eighteen years passed before archaeologists took a closer look at the site, but when they did, they discovered the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America.

What they found were artifacts from pre-Paleo-Indians who had arrived in North America long before the Gauls conquered France, before the Great Pyramids of Giza were built and before farming began in the Fertile Crescent. Dennis Stanford, head of Paleo-Archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, explained that these people were big game hunters. “[They hunted] extinct animals such as mammoth, giant bison, camel, horses and we find evidence of them from the Chesapeake Bay all the way to San Francisco and down into South America. And they lasted until about 9000 years ago when they were replaced by other peoples that came in and began to be gatherers more than hunters,” Stanford said.

For many years, the oldest evidence of human existence in North America dated back 12,000 years. But when Albert Miller’s property was excavated in the early 1970s, Smithsonian archaeologists made a remarkable discovery. Radiocarbon dating showed that several artifacts were 16,000 years old.

David Scofield, director of Meadowcroft, said not only did the results put people on this continent 4,000 years earlier than previously believed, but it put them in a place inconsistent with earlier theories of human migration from Asia through Alaska and down the west coast.

He noted that, it wasn’t well received at first because it contradicted what was previously understood to be the first people in North America. “So, many archaeologists insisted the artifacts must have been contaminated or the tests simply weren’t conducted properly.”

But the Smithsonian has held firm to its original results, which have been reconfirmed through the years using more advanced technology, said Stanford. “And so now it’s pretty clear – to most of us at least – that the dates at Meadowcroft are correct and that they show one of the earliest finds of pre-Paleo people was at Meadowcroft. Oddly enough it wasn’t in British Columbia, or Alaska or Montana, but Pennsylvania.”

Stanford’s theory is that people migrated to both sides of the North American continent, and that Meadowcroft’s first inhabitants were early Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in boats as they followed game such as seals.

3 comments… add one
  • It is amazing how this is still unfolding. The Clinton administration actually colluded to destroy a site in Oregon (or Washington) that seemed to tell of a conflict between Asiatic originating migrants with earlier people of European descent, because Native American groups didn’t like the thought that they might not have been the original “natives.”

    Its fascinating.

  • I think you’re talking about “Kennebunk Man”. My suspicion is that it’s harder to identify prehistoric origins based on modern day racial characteristics than some are giving credit.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I just finished reading Bryan Sykes’ “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland,” which I thought was pretty persuasive on the use of DNA to test migration theories, but only to the extent it relied on lots of DNA testing held up to the archaeological finds, the nature of the land and water, and (last of all) the written histories.

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