Mastodon bones offer clues of earliest humans in North America
(CNN)It's a discovery that could rewrite the story of southeastern United States.
Stone
tools and mastodon bones found at the bottom of a Florida river point
to humans living in the region 14,550 years ago. That's more than 1,500
years earlier than previously believed, scientists say.
"This is a big deal," said Jessi Halligan, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University.
"It's pretty exciting. We thought we knew the answers to how and when we got here, but now the story is changing."
The discovery on the Aucilla River was reported Friday by the journal Science Advances.
Butchered bones, knives
The
four-year study included sending divers to the Page-Ladson site, a deep
hole 30 feet underwater in the Aucilla River, researchers said.
There,
divers excavated artifacts such as butchered bones of extinct animals, a
mastodon tusk and a biface, which is a knife fragment with sharp edges.
Divers excavated bones and tools from the Page-Ladson, which is 30 feet underwater in the Aucilla River
"At Page-Ladson, hunter-gatherers, possibly accompanied by dogs,
butchered or scavenged a mastodon carcass at the sinkhole's edge next
to a small pond at ~14,550," the authors said in Science Advances.
What
was once a pond was buried beneath the murky waters for a series of
reasons, including centuries of civilization, rising sea levels and
layers of sediment.
"These people
had successfully adapted to their environment; they knew where to find
freshwater, game, plants, raw materials for making tools, and other
critical resources for survival."
The scientists used radiocarbon dating techniques to find out how old the artifacts are.
What about the Clovis?
Until
that point, researchers had believed the Clovis people were among the
first inhabitants of the Americas about 13,000 years ago, according to
the study. Page-Ladson is the first pre-Clovis site documented in the
southeastern part of North America, it said.
"The
new discoveries at Page-Ladson show that people were living in the Gulf
Coast area much earlier than believed," said Michael R. Waters,
director of Texas A&M's center for the study of the first Americans.
Waters was one of the study's lead authors.
In
the 1980s, other researchers had retrieved several stone tools and a
mastodon tusk from the site, but their discovery did not make much news.
Halligan
and her colleagues returned to the site in 2012 and expanded on the
previous research and archaeological finds. In one of the instances, a
mastodon tusk recovered earlier had deep grooves. They concluded the
grooves were made by humans during the tusk's extraction.
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