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Blobrana


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Tools found in Minnesota may be 14,000 years old
Archaeologists have discovered stone tools atop a hill in Minnesota that may be 13,000 to 14,000 years old. From the rough stone tools, archaeologists are speculating that "we're looking at certainly the relatively earliest occupants of the North American continent" - Matt Mattson, biologist and archaeologist.

Britta Bloomberg, Minnesota's deputy historic preservation officer, said it may be among the oldest known archaeological sites in North and South America. A half-dozen archaeologists, soil scientists and others who have examined the site all said the artefacts are genuine.
The stone tools were found while archaeologists were investigating the path of a road where the city is planning to expand for a community centre, housing and businesses. Archaeologists found 50 or more objects while digging through an area of about 50 square yards. The artefacts ranged from large hammer stones to small hand-held scrapers. The objects were found underneath a band of rock and gravel that appeared to have been deposited by melting glaciers and then covered by windblown sediment. Other researchers have found that that part of Minnesota apparently was something of an "oasis" around 13,000 years ago, an area free of ice cover with shifting glaciers on most sides but with an access route to the southeast.
David Mather, state archaeologist for the National Register of Historic Places, said the site appears to be "much older" than the Clovis era of finely made spear points that defines the paleo-Indian period. The find is "startling enough that appropriate response from every archaeologist and glacial geologist is scepticism." But, he added, a half-dozen archaeologists, soil scientists and others who have examined the site all say the artefacts are genuine.
Human remains, wood or textiles, if there were any, would have dissolved long ago in the acidic soil. The oldest human remains found in Minnesota belonged to the Browns Valley Man, who lived about 9,000 years ago. His remains were discovered in 1933 in a gravel pit near the town of Browns Valley in western Minnesota.
Much more research needs to be done to allow firm conclusions, Wells and her colleagues acknowledged.

"It's bound to be controversial" - Matt Mattson, another archaeologist on the project.

Not only do the age of the items and the soil in which they were found need to be confirmed, it must also be determined whether the objects are really human-made artefacts or merely rocks that were chipped in interesting ways by glaciers during the Ice Age. And it's not yet certain if the items were left at the site by humans, or carried there by glaciers or flowing water.

Source: Wcco.com

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Blobrana


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A man hunting for American Indian artefacts with his sons along a gravel bar on the Missouri River has uncovered an ancient fishhook that is making collectors envious....
The hook is made of bone and covers his entire palm, making it much larger than most bone hooks.
Joe Harl, of the Archaeological Research Centre of St. Louis, said the size of the hook suggests the fisherman who used it was after a larger fish.
Another artefact collector, Kenny Bassett, said the large size of the hook might indicate an earlier origin. American Indians used bigger rocks and tools in earlier periods to hunt larger game such as wooly mammoths. He said the hook could have been used to fish for pallid sturgeon or enormous catfish.
Harl said sandier soil in spots along the river might have kept the hook preserved. He said the hook could be anywhere from 300 to 12,000 years old.
Henley, a maintenance man at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has no plans to learn the hook's exact age. Carbon dating the item would require drilling through the fragile bone, and he doesn't want to risk ruining the hook.

Source Columbia Daily Tribune

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Blobrana


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What appeared to be an oddly shaped black rock lying on a New Brunswick beach a few years ago could help archaeologists learn about an ancient time period they know little about.
A woman walking along a beach at New Brunswick’s Cape Spear saw the rock in an area near the Confederation Bridge — and it turned out to be a piece of black chert that was shaped into a spear more than 9,000 years ago.

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Blobrana


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In a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee laboratory, a 9,000-year-old detective story unfolds that's part biology, part "CSI." Leading the investigation with a magnifying glass in hand is Jean Hudson, UWM associate professor of anthropology. What remains of a body lies preserved and bubbling in a water tank in her Zoo archaeology Processing Lab. It's the black bones of a prehistoric, possibly extinct elk that a swimmer found July 2005 at the bottom of a lake in Barnes, Wisconsin.

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Blobrana


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They are questions that have intrigued scientists, archaeologists and historians for centuries: When did Native Americans first arrive on the North American continent, and where did they settle?
Now, Robert Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium, and Kevin McBride, research director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and other researchers hope to answer that question.
On Wednesday, Ballard, McBride and Dwight Coleman, the IFE's research director, outlined plans for a multiyear expedition to chart the location of ancient coastlines now underwater, identify sites of Native American settlements and find artefacts to prove they were there and date their arrival.

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Blobrana


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Cuatro Cienegas footprints
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A trail of 13 fossilised footprints running through a valley in a desert in northern Mexico could be among the oldest in the Americas.
The footprints were made by hunter gatherers who are believed to have lived thousands of years ago in the Coahuila valley of Cuatro Cienegas, 306 kms south of Eagle Pass, Texas.

"We believe (the footprints) are between 10,000 and 15,000 years old. We have evidence of the presence of hunter gatherers in the Coahuila desert more than 10,000 years ago" - Archaeologist Yuri de la Rosa Gutierrez, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

So far, there have only been initial tests to find the age of the prints and more tests will be carried out both in Mexico and at a laboratory in Bristol in Great Britain.
The oldest discovered footprints in the Western hemisphere are in Chile, and are believed to be 13,000 years old. There 6,000-year old footprints in the U.S. state of California, in Brazil and in Nicaragua.
The Cuatro Cienegas footprints were discovered in May embedded in a white rock called travertine, it said in the news release.
Each footprint is 27 cm long and 2 cm deep. They spread over a distance of 10 meters.
It is likely they were imprinted in mud and preserved by some rapid change in the environment.

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Blobrana


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Human Migration
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Scientists have found new evidence that the Bering Strait near Alaska flooded into the Arctic Ocean about 11,000 years ago, about 1,000 years earlier than widely believed, closing off the land bridge thought to be the major route for human migration from Asia to the Americas.
Knowledge of climate change and sea level rise in the Arctic Ocean has been limited because sediment cores collected from the floor of the Arctic Ocean have been taken from locations where sediment has accumulated only about one centimetre every 1,000 years. Such slow rates make it impossible for scientists to distinguish between one millennium and the next.
In a paper in the October issue of Geology magazine, lead author Lloyd Keigwin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues from WHOI, Neal Driscoll from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst report results from three new core sites north and west of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea. At these locations, accumulation of sediment is more than 100 times greater than at previous sites, allowing identification of climate changes that were previously unseen. During the expeditions, the researchers extracted the longest piston core ever obtained from the Arctic region.
The Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean covers part of the continental shelf exposed when sea level fell during the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago. When sea level was low the climate in the area was more continental across a large area of the Arctic, and when sea level was high the flow of water from the North Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, where the sill depth is 50 metres, affected the freshwater and nutrient balance of the Arctic and the North Atlantic. The traditional view that humans and fauna migrated across the exposed shelf before flooding has been challenged by recent studies suggesting a maritime route for migration.

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Blobrana


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Learning how to live off the sea may have played a key role in the expansion of early humans around the globe.

After leaving Africa, human groups probably followed coastal routes to the Americas and South-East Asia.
Professor Jon Erlandson says the maritime capabilities of ancient humans have been greatly underestimated.
He has found evidence that early peoples in California pursued a sophisticated seafaring lifestyle 10,000 years ago.

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Blobrana


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Coclean culture
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Certain small remnants of the ancient Coclean culture have endured, mostly in forms that proved useful to the Spanish conquerors who destroyed it, but the language and its oral history have been lost. So, too, has the precise meaning of these petroglyphs, carved on a large boulder in Cocle province's town of El Valle de Anton.

Because the figure at the top right of the photo above appears to be the head of a horse, it is presumed by many that these drawings date back to just after the Spaniards arrived, early in the 15th century. Now, however, there are arguments presented, with certain scintillas of evidence, that in the early 1420s elements of the Chinese treasure fleet visited here and those visitors would have had horses and probably would have included an international assortment of ships and crews, with people who could read and write in several, mainly Asiatic, scripts.

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Blobrana


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Quarry of the Ancestors
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Oilsands activity in Edmonton (Canada) has uncovered vast wealth of a different kind - a 10,000-year-old quarry rich with tools and weapons from some of the first Albertans, including a pristine spearpoint still smeared with the blood of a woolly mammoth.

"There's quite a rich concentration of artefacts" - Jack Ives, Alberta's provincial archaeologist.

The so-called Quarry of the Ancestors, which scientists suspect may be one of the first places where humans put down roots in northern Alberta after the retreat of the glaciers, is found on an outcrop of hard, fine-grained sandstone adjacent to the Albian Sands oilsands lease about 75 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.
The quarry was discovered in 2003 and the site's importance was evident almost immediately, said Nancy Saxberg, who conducted the field work. Spearpoints, knives, scrapers, stone flakes and tiny micro-blades that would have been fastened to a wood or bone handle all began to emerge from the boreal loam.

"People were prying this stuff out of the ground in chunks" - Nancy Saxberg.

One investigator turned up a spearpoint still sharp enough to penetrate flesh.
As well as offering beautifully preserved examples of fine ancient craftsmanship, the Quarry of the Ancestors will provide vital clues to North America's human history. The soil at the site is unusually deep for the area, said Ives, allowing archaeologists to separate material from different time periods. Tools fashioned from rock known as Beaver River Sandstone have also turned up at hundreds of sites in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Until now, the source of the stone has been mysterious. It came from the Quarry of the Ancestors.
Ives has assembled what he believes to be the outline of the area's history. People first started coming into the area about 12,000 years ago, as the glaciers gradually retreated north into what is now the Northwest Territories. People followed their retreat, passing through the quarry area as part of their nomadic rounds, stocking up on the excellent stone and hunting when game presented itself. Human occupation was interrupted about 10,000 years ago when a massive flood from Glacial Lake Agassiz inundated the area. People returned as the floodwaters abated, this time sticking around instead of just passing through. The quarry was a centre of occupation for thousands of years.
In an area where land access is increasingly complicated by oilsands leases, Lisa Schaldemose of the Fort MacKay band wants the quarry to be permanently available to its community for use as a gathering place.
Everyone agrees the quarry, which is surrounded by oilsands leases, should be preserved. Birch Hills Resources, which owns the quarry rights, will expand elsewhere, said owner Don Dabbs. And Ives's department is asking Community Development Minister Denis Ducharme to declare the site a provincial historic resource, which would preserve it.

Source The Hamilton Spectator

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