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Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

VINTAGE SKULLS Researcher Silvia Gonzalez examines a 13,000-year-old skull. (Liverpool John Moores University) The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas. Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are...

Bye Bye, Beringia Anthropology and Archaeology of The Americas by Bill Jones One might think that Archeology sites throughout the World have produced many datable human remains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ancient human remains have so rarely been found that these singular findings could not be connected to others to form chronologies about human evolution. The scarcity of human remains to be analyzed has prevented the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology from forming conclusions about the cultural levels of ancient humans. We try to measure the culture of a people in terms of the totality of their...

Earlier I posted an article titled Bye, Bye Beringia (8,000 Year Old Site In Florida. I just turned on The Learning Channel and caught about ten minutes of the ending of a program titled, 'Secrets Of The Bog People: Windover', it is about this 'Windover' site in Florida. A doctor Gregory from Cornell said that preliminary DNA samples taken from the brains of some of the people indicate they are European. They also showed a reconstructed face of one of the skulls. I checked my TLC schedule and it indicates that another showing will be at 11:00PM CST tonight. This...

ST. LOUIS—The first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The tools don’t match Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little...

The First Americans May Have Come by Water by E. James Dixon If the foragers who created Clovis culture walked into North America, they had to pass through the long-described “ice-free corridor.” But a growing body of evidence indicates that pathway between the great glaciers of the last Ice Age was closed — in fact, the way south may have been blocked until centuries after the dawn of Clovis. If the first Americans could not walk into the New World, how did they get there? Coastal or ocean routes navigated by watercraft are the most likely explanation. No reliably dated ...

The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published online on January 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. After the Last Glacial Maximum some 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, one group entered North America from Beringia following the ice-free Pacific coastline, while another traversed an open land corridor between two ice sheets to arrive directly into the region east of the Rocky Mountains. (Beringia is the landmass that connected northeast Siberia to Alaska during the last...

The Smithsonian archaeologist pursuing the contentious claim that ancient Europeans fleeing the Ice Age settled in America says artifacts unearthed in the Chesapeake Bay region support his theory. Smithsonian Institution curator of archaeology Dennis Stanford argues that about 18,000 years ago, Solutrean hunters from the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal followed seals and other marine mammals for their fur, food and fuel across a partially frozen north Atlantic Ocean to the New World... "Pre-Clovis is a fact in North and South America," archaeologist Michael Collins of the University of Texas at Austin said this year at a symposium on...

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...

Calico: A 200,000-year old site in the Americas? New World archaeological sites inferred to be even slightly older than the 11.5 ka Clovis complexes have been controversial; so claims for a 200 ka site in North America have heretofore been treated with substantial disdain. But the acceptance of Monte Verde and Diring may soon change that. The classic "ancient site" in the New World is "Calico," located in the Central Mojave Desert of California (Shlemon and Budinger, 1990). Two issues have dogged acceptance of Calico by mainstream archaeologists: (1) the authenticity of the artifacts; are they truly the product of ...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

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...

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....

Catastrophic Flooding from Ancient Lake May Have Triggered Cold Period CLIMATE CHANGE, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION, JEFF DONNELLY, ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE Newswise — Imagine a lake three times the size of the present-day Lake Ontario breaking through a dam and flooding down the Hudson River Valley past New York City and into the North Atlantic. The results would be catastrophic if it happened today, but it did happen some 13,400 years ago during the retreat of glaciers over North America and may have triggered a brief cooling known as the Intra-Allerod Cold Period. Assistant Scientist Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods...

An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age -- 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders, explained that climate changes affecting the North Atlantic ice sheet probably gave rise to periodic overlaps in bear habitats. These overlaps then led to hybridization, or interbreeding -- an event that caused maternal DNA from brown...

An extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago wiped out mammoths and started a mini-ice age, scientists believe Margaret Munro CanWest News Service Monday, May 14, 2007 A comet or some other extraterrestrial object appears to have slammed into northern Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered an abrupt and catastrophic climate change that wiped out the mammoths and many other prehistoric creatures, according to a team of U.S. scientists. Evidence of the ecological disaster exists in a thin layer of sediment that has been found from Alberta to New Mexico, say the researchers, whose work adds a dramatic and provocative twist to...

Stone Age Columbus - questions and answersWhat was the Ice Age climate like in southern France/Spain? During the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago the climate was a lot colder and drier than now. In southern France one could expect summer temperatures of between 5-10°C and winter temperatures dropping below -20°C. Even so, there were three basic land types that had their own advantages and disadvantages for people: Wide coastal plain that was probably an open grass land with sparse vegetation Uplands that would have been much like the Arctic tundra today Inland valleys that were well sheltered and...

In this companion Web site to the NOVA program Mystery of the Megaflood, explore the Channeled Scabland through an interactive map, read an interview with geologist Vic Baker, take a geology quiz, visit our teacher's guide, and more... Mystery of the Megaflood: What unleashed a catastrophic flood that scarred thousands of square miles in the American Northwest? Airs on PBS September 20, 2005... Airs on PBS May 16, 2006.

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

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.....