A significant find of 15,000 year old artifacts in a cave in Texas has pushed the estimates of the earliest settlement of the Americas back about 2,500 years:
A massive cache of 15,500-year-old artifacts from a Texas flood plain is providing what archaeologists are calling the first unequivocal evidence that the people of the well-known Clovis culture, long thought to be the first humans to inhabit North America, were not.
Archaeologists had previously found several sites, such as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania and the Paisley Caves in Oregon, that appeared to predate the Clovis culture and its distinctive fluted spear points, but the paucity of artifacts from those sites made such a conclusion highly controversial.
All of those sites together produced perhaps 800 artifacts total, but the new Buttermilk Creek site north of Austin has produced nearly 16,000 pieces — all of them buried beneath Clovis remains and thus older.
There’s good evidence at several other sites (Brunham, El Cedral, etc.) of human habitation going back much farther than 15,500 BP, but the Clovis-First “experts” are in denial about them. The Buttermilk Creek site is mostly notable for the copious amount of artifacts recovered and the indisputable certainty of the dating as pre-Clovis. It’s another nail in the Clovis-First coffin, albeit a rather big and less-disputable one.
Oops, “Burnham” not Brunham.