Dating of a large tool assemblage at the Cooper’s Ferry site (Idaho, USA)
science.org
science.org
We took a trip with a rafting guide out of Riggins, ID who has been running the river since the late 1970's I think. It was my third trip with him as guide and each as memorable as the last. He has always been active with the local tribes attempting to return fish to the river and on issues concerning access to and use of the river.
On this trip we stopped at the archaeological dig and had a tour led by the professor in charge of the field work. There were students digging and sifting and we were able to see example artifacts that they found. We heard the history of the area and some of the things that they had already determined about the age of the occupation and use. It was a great stop and we each got a bandana as a gift. The professor also leads a dig in Texas, the Gault site, I think where they have similar preClovis dates for that initial occupation. I grew up in that part of Texas and my family has deep roots there in the area.
Abstract
The timing and character of the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas are measured by the discovery of unequivocal artifacts from well-dated contexts. We report the discovery of a well-dated artifact assemblage containing 14 stemmed projectile points from the Cooper’s Ferry site in western North America, dating to ~16,000 years ago. These stemmed points are several thousand years older than Clovis fluted points (~13,000 cal yr B.P.) and are ~2300 years older than stemmed points found previously at the site. These points date to the end of Marine Isotope Stage 2 when glaciers had closed off an interior land route into the Americas. This assemblage includes an array of stemmed projectile points that resemble pre-Jomon Late Upper Paleolithic tools from the northwestern Pacific Rim dating to ~20,000 to 19,000 years ago, leading us to hypothesize that some of the first technological traditions in the Americas may have originated in the region.This is a follow-up to a 2019 paper by the same authors detailing a new excavation that was conducted to address remaining questions/uncertainties that weren't resolved by the previous excavation. The dates are within their previous 2-sigma estimate, which strongly supports the prior results.
Because the above isn't a very interesting argument, they go further and argue that this latest find has enough points to do something called typological classification and that analysis supports the long-standing argument that the "Western Stemmed Tradition" is related to a broader Pacific stemmed point tradition/complex. Other archaeologists have argued that the preclovis traditions were more likely to have been related to central asian / central siberian complexes, but there's been some issues with the predictions from that camp over the past few years. There isn't a definite answer, but most people lean towards the former.
The Americas were discovered multiple times, from multiple direction, by multiple people. What order they were is only my vague guess except for the last one.
Today children are taught that the Americas was settled by people crossing the frozen Bering Sea. But, this discovery further discredits this simplistic hypothesis.
I think the Americas were settled numerous times from the Pacific Rim through boats, the Bering crossing on foot, and through more boats reasonably West Africa, and Northern Europe - all prior to Cristoforo Colombo.
Watch the video :) https://youtu.be/pYFFR2rROYM?t=449
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purcell_Trench
If these people were there at this time they could have been describing one of these outflows in their flood myths. I have read/heard that many of the tribes down the Columbia river have flood stories as well.
It is interesting to hike up to where the water line was. You can clearly see it in the rimrock and hills/mountains around Coeur d'Alene/Spokane. Missoula is even more pronounced with the lake rings. You can stand on Chilco Peak and look west it is all flat and filled in up to a certain point with aggregate (lots of gravel, great aquifer) and you look east and it looks like typical mountain valleys. The ridges nearby formed the barrier to the flow.
edits: add more info
There is nothing here to suggest, as he speculates, "that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica."
History (and the world) is full of mystery. Though we shouldn't let our imagination run wild, we also should leave some avenues open. As someone who read a lot of Conan The Barbarian back in the 70's I certainly love the idea of the mysterious ancients.