New clues dig far into America’s past

WASHINGTON - Researchers who dove hundreds of times into a sinkhole beneath the brown murky waters of Florida's Aucilla River have retrieved some of the oldest evidence of human presence in the Americas, including stone tools apparently used to butcher a mastodon.

Scientists said Friday the tools, animal bones and mastodon tusk found at the site showed that people already had occupied the American Southeast by 14,550 years ago, about 1,500 years earlier than previously known.

The site provided some of the most compelling evidence that humans had spread across the New World earlier than the so-called Clovis people, who archaeologists for six decades considered the first people of the Americas. The Clovis people, recognized for their distinctive spearheads, are known from archaeological evidence 13,000 years old.

The artifacts painted a picture of human hunter-gatherers butchering or scavenging a mastodon, an extinct elephant cousin, next to a small inland pond. The tusk had cut marks from a tool used to remove it from the skull, perhaps to access edible tissue at its base.

Intrigued by previous archaeological finds at the site, the researchers conducted 890 dives into the 35-foot-deep sinkhole in limestone bedrock near Florida's capital Tallahassee from 2012 to 2014.

They excavated stone tools including a biface, a stone knife useful for butchering animals, and bones of extinct big mammals including camels, bison, horses and mastodons.

Florida State University anthropologist Jessi Halligan, who dove 126 times, said nomadic hunter-gatherers might have followed big prey such as mastodons from water hole to water hole. Bones that appear to be from dogs suggest the hunter-gatherers had canine companions with them.

No humans are thought to have been in the Americas until people crossed the land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska during the ice age but the timing of that event remains mysterious.

'The evidence from the Page-Ladson site is a major leap forward in shaping a new view of the peopling of the Americas at the end of the last ice age,” Texas A&M University archaeologist Michael Waters said.

'In the archaeological community, there's still a terrific amount of resistance to the idea that people were here before Clovis.”