Oldest stone tools in the Americas claimed in Chile 17,000 to 19,000 years ago.
Archaeologist Tom Dillehay didn’t want to return to Monte Verde. Decades ago, his discoveries at the famous site in southern Chile showed that humans occupied South America by 14,500 years ago, thousands of years earlier than thought, stirring a long and exhausting controversy. Now, Dillehay, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has been lured back—and he is preparing for renewed debate. He reports in PLOS ONE today that people at Monte Verde built fires, cooked plants and meat, and used tools 18,500 years ago, which would push back the peopling of the Americas by another 4000 years.
If his team is correct, the discovery will “shake up both the archaeology and genomics of the peopling of the Americas,” says archaeologist Jon
Erlandson of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of Paleoindians first left Siberia no earlier than 23,000 years ago (Science, 21 August, p. 841), so Dillehay’s new dates suggest they wasted little time in reaching the southern tip of the Americas. And the find raises questions about the North American record, where no one has found widely accepted evidence of occupation before 14,300 years ago. “Where the hell were the people in North America at that hour?” wonders archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
When Dillehay began his work at Monte Verde in the 1970s, most researchers thought the Clovis people, who hunted big game in North America starting about 13,000 years ago (using calibrated radiocarbon dates), were the first Americans. When Dillehay reported traces of huts, hearths, human footprints, and artifacts that were thousands of years older, he was forced to defend every detail of his dig to skeptical colleagues. By now, though, most archaeologists accept the older occupation at Monte Verde and a few other sites.
When the Chilean government invited Dillehay to survey the full extent of Monte Verde, he at first refused. “I was tired of it,” he says. But in 2013, fearing another team’s survey might damage the site, he returned, hoping to spend a few weeks collecting new evidence of ancient plants and climate by digging 50 small test trenches across a 20,000-square-meter area. But the dig turned up 39 stone artifacts, including flakes, a “chopper,” and cores, embedded near plants or animal bones that had been burned in small fires at 12 areas. This suggests a “spotty, ephemeral presence,” he says.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/11/oldest-stone-tools-americas-claimed-chile
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Islands are important to human survival in areas with huge predators, and floating on water one is safer from land predators. And what does the path to the Americas have, innumerable islands along the rugged, volcanic Pacific Rim. In the Mediterranean too, early humans made it to some islands. Think Greece, an island world. Humans adapt to water, little problem, huge asset.
Having lived on a river in the Amazon, traveling either on foot in the jungle or by canoe, I'll attest that in a roadless world, a river is the supreme byway--no maintainance, free, no hills, and full of free fish. Fish are an important part of survival.. Almost everyone lives on the river shore, rarely penetrating deep into the jungle.
Today, my jungle village of 45 years ago has a road. Note the vehicles at the annual gathering, still held on the playa of the river nonetheless.
And I like your signature, it reminds me of something Carl Sagan said: "We are a way for the Universe to know itself."
And we have DNA evidence linking the occupants of the Americas to Siberia and the Asian Pacific Rim arctic.
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The far greater linguistic diversity in South America suggests it was settled first. There were simply not a lot of people in North America before Clovis.
There are a couple of ways they could have arrived. Maybe down the coast from Alaska, stopping only briefly at now-submerged sites and moving along quickly. Maybe by accidental drift voyages from somewhere in the vicinity of Japan, where the currents can take you straight to California.
They wouldn't have had the navigational skills of the much later Polynesians, but they certainly were at home on the water.
