Tools Suggest Earlier Human Arrival in America

[Kosmo]

"For many years, scientists have thought that the first Americans came here from Asia 13,000 years ago, during the last ice age, probably by way of the Bering Strait. They were known as the Clovis people, after the town in New Mexico where their finely wrought spear points were first discovered in 1929. But in more recent years, archaeologists have found more and more traces of even earlier people with a less refined technology inhabiting North America and spreading as far south as Chile.

 

And now clinching evidence in the mystery of the early peopling of America

[Melvadius]

The BBC have a good article on this topic here

 

The long-held theory of how humans first populated the Americas may have been well and truly broken.

 

Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of stone tools that predate the technology widely assumed to have been carried by the first settlers.

 

The discoveries in Texas are seen as compelling evidence that the so-called Clovis culture does not represent America's original immigrants.

 

Details of the 15,500-year-old finds are reported in Science magazine.

 

A number of digs across the Americas in recent decades had already hinted that the "Clovis first" model was in serious trouble.

 

But the huge collection of well-dated tools excavated from a creek bed 60km (40 miles) northwest of Austin mean the theory is now dead, argue the Science authors.

 

"This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, 'hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas'," Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University anthropologist, told reporters.

 

For 80 years, it has been argued that the Clovis culture was the first to sweep into the New World.

 

These people were defined by their highly efficient stone-tool technology. Their arrow heads and spear points were formidable hunting weapons and were used to bring down the massive beasts of the Ice Age, such as mammoth, mastodon and bison.

....continued