Ancient stone tools suggest first people arrived in America earlier than thought

[PeteS in CA]

Ancient stone tools suggest first people arrived in America earlier than thought

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/ancient-stone-tools-suggest-first-people-arrived-america-earlier-thought-n1234578

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.

They date from a time when the continent seems to have been occupied by only a few groups of early humans – perhaps “lost migrations” that left little trace on the landscape and in the genetic record, Ardelean said.

The tools were found in the deepest layer of sediment they excavated, which dates from up to 33,000 years ago – long before the last Ice Age, which occurred between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago.

The commonly accepted time for the arrival of the first people in North America is about 16,000 years ago, and recent studies estimate it happened up to 18,000 years ago. But the latest discoveries push the date back by more than 10,000 years.

[Smokin Joe]

Ancient stone tools suggest first people arrived in America earlier than thought

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/ancient-stone-tools-suggest-first-people-arrived-america-earlier-thought-n1234578

I had a 'heretic' archaeology prof 40 years ago who postulated 32,000 years ago for the first people here.
He strongly doubted Clovis was first.
Hey Doc! You got it right!

[Sighlass]

I always take this articles with a grain of salt, carbon dating is considered by many to be a joke. We really have no idea the time line past 4k years...

[Smokin Joe]

I always take this articles with a grain of salt, carbon dating is considered by many to be a joke. We really have no idea the time line past 4k years...

But we cn and do have the stratification present in a site to establish that the lower strata are older than the ones above them, or we can see the disturbance which led to the inversion or penetration of layers.

Carbon dating is most accurate in strata which antedate nuclear explosions, and best when verified by other means.

There was a corridor for migration at around 32000 BP, and it is highly likely humans migrated along it.

[Elderberry]

Controversial cave discoveries suggest humans reached Americas much earlier than thought

Nature by Colin Barras 7/22/2020

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02190-y

The discovery, which includes hundreds of ancient stone tools, is backed up by a fresh statistical analysis that incorporates data from other sites. But the conclusion has stirred controversy among some researchers.

The first humans in the Americas came from East Asia, but when they began to arrive is hotly debated. Some researchers think that it could have been as early as 130,000 years ago, although most of the archaeological evidence supporting this theory is disputed. For instance, some of the stone artefacts are so simple that sceptics say they were probably produced by natural geological processes rather than by people. The mainstream view is that the peopling of the Americas began about 15,000 or 16,000 years ago — based on genetic evidence and artefacts found at sites including the 14,000-year-old Monte Verde II in Chile.

The latest discoveries, published on 22 July in Nature1, question that consensus. Since 2012, a team led by Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico has been excavating Chiquihuite Cave, which is 2,740 metres above sea level in the country’s Astillero Mountains. The researchers found almost 2,000 stone tools, 239 of which were embedded in layers of gravel that have been carbon dated to between 25,000 and 32,000 years old.

There are so few of these oldest tools that Ardelean thinks the site was visited only occasionally, perhaps used as a refuge every few decades, during particularly severe winters. At the height of the last ice age, 26,000 years ago, North America would have been a dangerous place. “There must have been horrible storms, hail, snow,” he says. He adds that the Chiquihuite Cave is well insulated and could have provided shelter to any humans who were around to witness the blizzards.

More at link.