4/25/2023 0 Comments Oldest human artifact"We were interested in reconstructing the evolution of the landscape in the context of environmental changes and some younger archaeological sites in the area," Holliday said. Holliday and study co-author Brendan Fenerty, a UArizona doctoral student in the Department of Geosciences, documented basic geologic layering and dating in trenches on the White Sands Missile Range near the discovery site several years before the tracks were found. This was 10,000 years before Clovis people." There are multiple layers of well-dated human tracks in streambeds where water flowed into an ancient lake. The White Sands tracks provide a much earlier date. Some think the arrival was later, no more than 13,000 years ago by makers of artifacts called Clovis points. "Few archaeologists see reliable evidence for sites older than about 16,000 years. "For decades, archaeologists have debated when people first arrived in the Americas," said co-author Vance Holliday, a professor in the UArizona School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences. "We can think of our ancestors as quite functional, hunting and surviving, but what we see here is also activity of play, and of different ages coming together. "The footprints left at White Sands give a picture of what was taking place, teenagers interacting with younger children and adults," said lead study author Matthew Bennett from Bournemouth University in England. Judging by their size, the tracks were left mainly by teenagers and younger children, with the occasional adult. The footprints tell an interesting tale of what life was like at this time. "Our dates on the seeds are tightly clustered and maintain stratigraphic order above and below multiple footprint horizons - this was a remarkable outcome," Springer said. It was previously thought that humans entered America much later, after the melting of the North American ice sheets, which opened up migration routes. This corresponds to the height of the last glacial cycle, during something known as the Last Glacial Maximum, and makes them the oldest known human footprints in the Americas. The dates range in age and confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years. Geological Survey, used radiocarbon dating of seed layers above and below the footprints to determine their age. Researchers Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, with the U.S. The excavations paid off with the discovery of three deliberately-shaped pieces of limestone - a pointed stone and two cutting flakes - that may be the oldest human tools yet found in the Americas.The findings are described in an article in the journal Science. A shaped limestone point, one of the stone tools found at the Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico that archaeologists think dates from around 30,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age. The steeply-inclined cave is high on a mountainside and filled with crumbling layers of gravel: “The deeper you go, the higher the risk for the walls to collapse,” he said. Precise archaeological dating of early human sites throughout North America, including the cave in Mexico, suggests instead that they may have entered along the Pacific coast, according to the research.Ĭiprian Ardelean, an archaeologist with the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico, the lead author of one of the papers, said the finds were the result of years of careful digging at the Chiquihuite Cave in north-central Mexico.
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