Free Republic

Altai in southern Siberia sits right at the centre of Russia. But the tiny, mountainous republic has a claim to fame unknown until now - Native Americans can trace their origins to the remote region. DNA research revealed that genetic markers linking people living in the Russian republic of Altai, southern Siberia, with indigenous populations in North America. A study of the mutations indicated a lineage shift between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago - when people are thought to have walked across the ice from Russia to America. This roughly coincides with the period when humans from Siberia are thought...

The tip of a bone point fragment found embedded in a mastodon rib from an archaeological site in Washington state shows that hunters were present in North America at least 800 years before Clovis, confirming that the first inhabitants arrived earlier to North America than previously thought, says a team of researchers led by a Texas A&M University archaeologist. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, and colleagues from Colorado, Washington and Denmark believe the find at the Manis site in Washington demonstrates that humans were...

This summer, archaeologists are continuing work at a 12,000-year-old prehistoric site which is yielding evidence of generations of wandering hunters who camped on a bluff overlooking the Kivalina River... The Raven Bluff site was discovered in 2007 by BLM archaeologist Bill Hedman and a crew conducting an archaeological site survey in the far northwest corner of Alaska. The Bering Land Bridge between Russia and North America may have still existed -- or had just submerged for the last time -- when hunters first frequented Raven Bluff... Essentially the remains of a garbage dump, the dig has offered up the oldest...

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced. But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is “bogus.”...

15,000 years ago, humans camped in a lush Texas valley, leaving thousands of artifacts behind, from tools to face paint. This could be definitive proof that ancient people arrived in America by boat, not by walking the Bering Strait. Anthropologist Michael Waters and colleagues announced their findings today, detailing the almost 16,000 artifacts they found near Buttermilk Creek, outside the Austin area. Their discovery will change everything you thought you knew about how people arrived in the Americas. Meet the Buttermilk Creek people What's remarkable is that this places human occupation of America over 2,000 years earlier than previously believed....

Caches of tools and animal remains from around 12,000 years ago, found on islands off the California coast, have given remarkable insight into the lives of the first Americans. The finds show fine tool technology and a rich maritime economy existed there. The tools vary markedly from mainland cultures of the era such as the Clovis. The finds, reported in Science, also suggest that rather than a land route to South America, early humans may have used coastal routes.....

<p>Some 11,500 years ago one of America's earliest families laid the remains of a 3-year-old child to rest in their home in what is now Alaska. The discovery of that burial is shedding new light on the life and times of the early settlers who crossed from Asia to the New World, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.</p>

Mexican archaeologists found three projectile points from the Clovis culture, associated with remains of a Gomphotheres – a now extinct type of elephant - dating back at least 12,000 years, in northern Sonora. The find is of major importance, as this is the first evidence in North America that this animal was contemporary with early humans. The location and date of these remains opens the possibility that in North America the Gomphotheres was still alive, in contrast with previous theories that suggest it had disappeared 30,000 years previously. The finds were made in early January at the site of ‘World’s...

CLOVIS, Calif. (AP) — It has become a never-ending heartache within the hallways of Buchanan High School: news that another former student has died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Eight former students have been killed in the two wars, including a Marine sergeant who will be laid to rest Saturday after dying Dec. 2 of a head wound in Afghanistan. The community in the heart of California's farm country has become all-too-familiar with the rituals of grief that have followed each death — tearful remembrances, flag-draped coffins, candlelight vigils. The school even built a memorial garden where the names of the...

Cranial features distinctive to Australian Aborigines are present in hundreds of skulls that have been uncovered in Central and South America, some dating back to over 11,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologist Walter Neves of the University of São Paulo, whose findings are reported in a cover story in the latest issue of Cosmos magazine, has examined these skeletons and recovered others, and argues that there is now a mass of evidence indicating that at least two different populations colonised the Americas.He and colleagues in the United States, Germany and Chile argue that first population was closely related to the Australian...

Legend Rock carries 10,000 years of profound beliefs Ice Age paintings and carvings in Europe are revered as sublime achievements of early humans, yet the prehistoric rock art in the American West is far less known. At Legend Rock in central Wyoming, 10,000 years of profound beliefs are inscribed on red sandstone cliffs. As the Pleistocene period ended approximately 12,000 years ago with the passing of the last Ice Age, people were spreading from Asia to North America and south into what is now the U.S. Archaeologists have found evidence that the early immigrants took advantage of the moderating climate...

For Darrel Higgins, finding an ancient arrowhead in a creek isn't surprising, it's actually expected. Finding a record-setting artifact that dates back to an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 years? Definitely unexpected. Higgins has been hunting creek beds for artifacts since he began finding them on farmland when he was a child. But nothing he had found compared to the 9 3/4 inch by 2 3/4 inch specimen he recently found in western Kentucky. The item, described as a clovis point made of buffalo river chert, was submerged in a creek bed when Higgins stumbled upon it. “As soon as I...

U.S. anthropologists hypothesize that ancestors of aboriginal people in South and North America followed High Arctic route Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed. The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies...

The secret is out: Man and gomphotheres once coexisted in Sonora. Tools and spear tips found with fossil bones at a remote Sonoran site suggest that Clovis-era hunters butchered two juvenile specimens of the elephantlike megafauna about 13,000 years ago. It's the first discovery of such recent evidence of gomphotheres in North America, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona anthropologist. It's also the first time gomphothere fossils were found together with implements made by Clovis people, the oldest known inhabitants of North America, Holliday said. The discovery, on a remote ranch in the Rio Sonora watershed, was actually made...

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 bed of artefacts in the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico also includes the bones of an extinct cousin of the mastodon called a gomphothere. The beast was probably hunted and killed by the Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points, who mysteriously disappeared within about 500 years of leaving their first archeological traces. Intact Clovis camp sites and extensive evidence of hunting has been found across the United States, with the highest concentration of sites just north of the Mexican border, in the San Pedro River basin of southeastern Arizona. But relatively little is known about their...

No evidence of an extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago, studies say. An independent study has cast more doubt on a controversial theory that a comet exploded over icy North America nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out the Clovis people and many of the continent's large animals.Sediments at the San Jon site, in eastern New Mexico, contained very low abundances of magnetic spherules said to be evidence of an impact.Vance Holliday Archaeologists have examined sediments at seven Clovis-age sites across the United States, and did not find enough magnetic cosmic debris to confirm that an extraterrestrial impact happened at that time,...

"The suit says the district violates the constitution in a variety of ways, including requiring students or their parents to pay fees in order to take part in curricular or extra-curricular activities in such areas as sports, cheerleading, band and choir."

Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California's Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago... In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an...

"These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper."

Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson says The Pacific Coast of the Americas was settled starting about 15,000 years ago during the last glacial retreat by seafaring peoples following a "kelp highway" rich in marine resources, a noted professor of anthropology theorized Wednesday. Jon Erlandson, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, suggested that especially productive "sweet spots," such as the estuaries of B.C.'s Fraser and Stikine rivers, served as corridors by which people settled the Interior of the province. Erlandson said in an interview these migrating peoples were already...

Cache of tools found in Boulder yard used to butcher ice-age camels, horses. The “chink” of the impact sounded odd, so the crew poked around, and just 18 inches beneath the soil surface they made an extraordinary find: 83 stone tools left in a cache 13,000 years ago by people who used the sharpened rocks to butcher ice-age camels. “Sometimes they’re interesting things, and sometimes they’re just cool rocks,” said Bamforth, who studies the culture and tools of Paleoindians, who lived in the Boulder area at the end of the last ice age. But a good anthropologist leaves no rock...

Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people — ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists. The home's owner, Patrick Mahaffy, thought they were only a century or two old before contacting researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "My jaw just dropped," said CU anthropologist Douglas Bamforth, who is leading a study of...

Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth's impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich comets or carbonaceous chondrites, reports a nine-member scientific team. These nanodiamonds, which are produced under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts and have been found in meteorites, are concentrated in similarly aged sediments at Murray Springs, Ariz., Bull Creek, Okla., Gainey, Mich., and Topper, S.C., as well as Lake Hind, Manitoba, and Chobot, Alberta, in Canada. Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth, but only through high-explosive detonations or...

For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate. Until now, they have found nothing conclusive-arrowheads, baskets, animal bones and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake, but is now a sagebrush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin. But a few years ago, University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his students...

Clovis points are the hallmark of one of America's earliest cultures: the Paleoindians. Since archaeologists found Clovis points lodged in the skeleton of a mammoth, they have viewed Paleoindians as big-game hunters par excellence... This macho view of Paleoindian prehistory has prevailed even though surprisingly little evidence exists to support it. In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, Kent State University archaeologist Mark Seeman and several co-researchers wrote of Paleoindian stone tools from the Nobles Pond site in Stark County. They reported the discovery of blood residue on eight Clovis points. Four were...

If you will look at the two points illustrated in today's article, the overall outline of each one does not look like the other one. However, both are typical Dalton points. One point has a parallel shaped stem while the other has a concave stem with flaring ears on the base. If the sites of Sloan and Brand in Arkansas and the Big Eddy site in southwestern Missouri had not been successfully excavated, we would not know both types are typical Dalton points dating to the same time period. For instance at the Sloan site in Arkansas, the archeologists recovered...

Texas Archaeological Dig Challenges Assumptions about First Americans Ancient stone artifacts reveal the day-to-day lives of Clovis people while offering tantalizing clues of an even earlier culture By Elizabeth Lunday Excavations at the Gault site in central Texas. FLORENCE, TEX.—"Look at that—isn't it gorgeous?" Sandy Peck asks as she rinses dirt from a flaked stone about the length and width of a pinky finger. Peck runs a hose over soil on a fine-mesh screen, prodding at stubborn clods of clay with a muddy glove. "Look, there's another one." Peck, sorting soil that had been disturbed by a recent thunderstorm, is...

Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research.....

Al Goodyear and the Secrets of the Ancient AmericansUSC Professor Discovers 50,000 Year-Old Artifacts in S.C. BY RON AIKEN It was the summer of 1998, and University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear had a problem on his hands. Fourteen years of digging at an ancient chert quarry outside Allendale had begun to bear fruit: At a site called Big Pine Tree, Goodyear was well on his way to establishing that a substantial Clovis population lived here. If you’ll recall your history lessons from high school, the Clovis people — named such because the first evidence of them was found...

How deep should we look for evidence of first Americans? By Bill Young Three sites in Texas have been discovered and at least partially excavated in the past 15 years yielding evidence of at least one culture older than Clovis. Most of the Clovis sites have been firmly dated to around 12,500 to 13,000 years ago. Not only did these Clovis sites yield projectile points of the very distinct Clovis type, the sites also yielded true blades and very large well- made thin preforms diagnostic of only the Clovis people. The archeologists who have worked at some of these Clovis...

Hold the potty humor, please, but archaeologists digging in a dusty cave in Oregon have unearthed fossilized feces that appear to be oldest biological evidence of humans in North America. The ancient poop dates back 14,300 years. If the results hold up, that means the continent was populated more than 1,000 years before the so-called Clovis culture, long believed to be the first Americans. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that the human presence in the Americas predates Clovis," said Michael Waters, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the project. DNA analysis of...

Clovis Overkill Didn't Wipe Out California's Sea Duck Newswise — Clovis-age natives, often noted for overhunting during their brief dominance in a primitive North America, deserve clemency in the case of California's flightless sea duck. New evidence says it took thousands of years for the duck to die out. A team of six scientists, including Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, pronounced their verdict in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (online, March 13) after holding court on thousands of years of archaeological testimony taken from bones of the extinct sea duck uncovered from 14 sites...

Site provides evidence for ancient comet explosion JOEY HOLLEMAN; McClatchy Newspapers Published: October 7th, 2007 01:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. – For the second time in less than a decade, a South Carolina river bluff holds evidence pointing to a theory with history-rewriting potential. Microscopic soil particles from the Topper site near Allendale might hold a tiny key to a big theory: that comet-caused explosions wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, prompted the last ice age and decimated the first human culture in North America about 12,900 years ago. The comet theory first began generating a buzz at an international meeting...

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists. The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists. The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Constructing the Solutrean Solution Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley Smithsonian Institution University of Exeter At the 1999 Clovis and Beyond Conference held in Santa Fe, we presented a hypothesis, now known as the "Solutrean Solution", to explain the origin of Clovis technology. The hypothesis is based on the fact that there is little commonality between Clovis and Northeast Asian technologies on the one hand, while on the other, there are many technological traits shared between Clovis and the Solutrean culture of Paleolithic Europe. In the past, scholars have rejected the idea of a historical connection between the two cultures because...

The Hubbard family of Clovis has lost a second son to the war in Iraq, according to the Clovis Police Department. Army Specialist Nathan Hubbard, 21, was killed while serving his country. The military has not yet released any details surrounding Hubbard’s death. The Hubbard family received notification of his death Wednesday afternoon. In 2004, Nathan's brother Lance Corporal Jared Hubbard and his childhood friend Jeremiah Baro were killed in action near Ramadi in November of 2004. Both Nathan and a third brother, Jason Hubbard, joined the the Army in 2005 following Jared's death.

June 28, 2007 Comet theory collides with Clovis research, may explain disappearance of ancient people A theory put forth by a group of 25 geo-scientists suggests that a massive comet exploded over Canada, possibly wiping out both beast and man around 12,900 years ago, and pushing the earth into another ice age. University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear said the theory may not be such "out-of-this-world" thinking based on his study of ancient stone-tool artifacts he and his team have excavated from the Topper dig site in Allendale, as well as ones found in Georgia, North Carolina and...

mammoth some 12,900 years ago. A team of two dozen scientists say the culprit was likely a comet that exploded in the atmosphere above North America. The explosions sent a heat and shock wave across the continent, pelted the ground with a layer of telltale debris, ignited massive wildfires and triggered a major cooling of the climate, said nuclear analytic chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of the scientists who presented the controversial new theory Thursday at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco. At least 15 species, mostly large mammals including mammoths, mastadons, giant ground...

Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon Oregon researchers involved in new Clovis-age impact theory Did a comet hit the Great Lakes region and fragment human populations 12,900 years ago? Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago. Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at...

Catastrophic Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts Jeanna Bryner LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com Mon May 21, 9:30 AM ET An extraterrestrial object with a three-mile girth might have exploded over southern Canada nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a major cold spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago. Research, presented today at a meeting of the American...

Archeologist, homeowner at odds over spear point Wednesday, March 28, 2007 This Clovis spearhead is believed to be 11,000 years old. A find of an 11,000-year-old Clovis spearhead has an archeologist up in arms because the owner of the site does not want any further research conducted. By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times The discovery of a Clovis spearhead, believed to be thousands of years old, at a local home construction site has the homeowner and an archeologist at odds on what should be done with the site. The property owner wants to finish her home and...

SEVERE WEATHER STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBUQUERQUE NM 800 PM MDT FRI MAR 23 2007 ...TORNADO WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FOR SOUTHEASTERN CURRY COUNTY UNTIL 815 PM MDT... AT 758 PM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR AND SKYWARN SPOTTERS WERE TRACKING A TORNADO. THIS TORNADO WAS LOCATED IN CLOVIS...MOVING NORTH AT 25 MPH. * THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR... RANCHVALE AROUND 815 PM MDT... A TORNADO WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1000 PM MDT FRIDAY EVENING FOR EAST CENTRAL NEW MEXICO.

The Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points, likely were not the first humans in the Americas, according to research placing their presence as more recent than previously believed. Using advanced radiocarbon dating techniques, researchers writing in the journal Science on Thursday said the Clovis people, hunters of large Ice Age animals like mammoths and mastodons, dated from about 13,100 to 12,900 years ago. That would make the Clovis culture, known from artifacts discovered at various sites including the town of Clovis, New Mexico, both younger and shorter-lived than previously thought. Previous estimates had dated the culture to about...

Aug 29, 2006 - Shots have been fired near Fresno State University, around the area of Cedar and Barstow. There are reports that an Officer has been shot, but it is not confirmed at this point.

Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times by Richard B. Firestone & William Topping The Paleoindian occupation of North America, theoretically the point of entry of the first people to the Americas, is traditionally assumed to have occurred within a short time span beginning at about 12,000 yr B.P. This is inconsistent with much older South American dates of around 32,000 yr B.P.1 and the similarity of the Paleoindian toolkit to Mousterian traditions that disappeared about 30,000 years ago.2. A pattern of unusually young radiocarbon dates in the Northeast has been noted by Bonnichsen and Will.3,4 Our research...

The First Americans By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr Newsweek, April 26, 1999 New digs and old bones reveal an ancient land that was a mosaic of peoples—including Asians and Europeans. Now a debate rages: who got here first? 'Skull wars:' Facial reconstruction of the 'Spirit Cave Man,' based on bones found in Spirit Cave, Churchill County, Nevada (David Barry--Courtesy Nevada State Museum; facial reconstruction by Sharon Long) As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple...

Who were the first people in North America? From where did they come? How did they arrive? The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever seen by over five millennia. The accepted version of the first Americans starts with a flint spearhead unearthed at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1933. Dated by the mammoth...