Clovis People Were Not Alone During Early Colonization of the Americas

[xchrom]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/13/clovis-people-had-company-in-early-colonization-of-the-americas/


Western Stemmed points from Paisley Caves date to more than 13,000 years ago--as old or older than Clovis points. Image: Jim Barlow

Once upon a time, the initial migration of humans into the New World looked like a very tidy story: the so-called Clovis people, it appeared, were the first to enter the Americas, arriving from Siberia by land bridge and spreading across the continental U.S. in pursuit of large game animals, leaving behind their telltale fluted stone tools and other remains. But in recent years, discoveries of remains that appear to pre-date the Clovis culture have upended that Clovis First scenario. Now new findings from the Paisley Caves in Oregon join the growing body of evidence that the human colonization of the Americas was more complex than researchers once thought, showing that a separate technological tradition co-existed with the Clovis one and may well have preceded it.

Previous work at the Paisley Caves had turned up preserved human feces (coprolites) containing DNA and some stone projectile points made in what archaeologists term the Western Stemmed Tradition, which differs from Clovis primarily in the way in which the point is affixed to a dart shaft. Initial dating results indicated that the remains rivaled Clovis in age, but questions about their antiquity lingered. In the new study, published in the July 13 Science, Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon and his colleagues report on high-precision radiocarbon dating of more than 100 new samples from Paisley Caves that establish the chronology of the site and put the oldest stone points at more than 13,000 years old, making them at least as old as the oldest known Clovis artifacts elsewhere.

The Clovis First theory predicts that the Western Stemmed technology evolved from the Clovis one, yet no Clovis tools or tools that look like they could have given rise to Clovis have turned up in Paisley Caves. Thus although Western Stemmed might share a common ancestral technology with Clovis, it does not come out of the Clovis lineage itself, Jenkins asserted in a press teleconference. In the Science paper he and his colleagues conclude: “The Paisley Caves evidence supports the hypothesis that the [Western Stemmed Technology] was an indigenous development in the far western United States, whereas Clovis may have developed independently in the Plains and Southeast.” The findings buttress claims for a non Clovis-derived tool-making tradition at the site of Monte Verde in Chile, Jenkins added, noting “this really seems to suggest there are multiple technology trajectories at the same time here at the end of the Pleistocene in the Western Hemisphere.”

[xchrom]

1. Oregon stone tools enliven 'earliest Americans' debate

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18814522


Dennis Jenkins holds a human coprolite dating to about 13,000 years ago

***SNIP


Multiple tests placed the coprolites and, by association, the oldest projectile points at 13,200 years before the present day - concurrent with our time estimates for the use Clovis technology in other parts of North America.


The scientists did date Paisley faeces as far back as 14,500 years ago, but no stone tools were found alongside those specimens, and so no really firm conclusions can be drawn about whether Western Stemmed points predated Clovis.

"We've got people in the cave at [14,500 years ago]; we have them showing up again right down through 13,000 years [ago], and there's no evidence of Clovis or precursor to Clovis. Therefore, the most likely answer is that it's Western Stemmed - but we have not proven that," cautioned Prof Jenkins.

For decades, it was assumed that the people associated with Clovis technology were the first human inhabitants of the New World - that they were the ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America.