by CKR
The Americas were the last continents that humans came to. There are continuing arguments about when.
I pulled an article (subscription only) from the 14 March Science magazine a week or so ago to write a post about. It is a review article that suggests that paleoanthropologists are coming to some agreement on the subject.
The Los Angeles Times has a good article today on the latest results, from Paisley Caves in Oregon. It seems that some of those early Americans left feces in those caves that have been identified as coming from 14,300 years ago, the earliest documented human occupation in the Americas. (The Boston Globe has an article on the find, with tonier language and a map.)
The news articles emphasize that the feces are older than any Clovis point sites have been dated, but this is no surprise in Science article, which mentions the Paisley Cave site as being a candidate for older occupation. Now the evidence is in on that. And if humans were in Oregon 14,300 years ago, they were in Alaska even earlier than that.
Clovis got a lot of press when it was discovered, largely because of the beautifully worked spear points first found there. Many more have been found since, in many places across North America, not so much to the south. We don’t know whether there were people in North America before the Clovis culture. We can’t even be sure that we would recognize evidence that they were there if we found it; the artifacts are almost certainly less spectacular.
The Science article goes on to say that DNA evidence suggests that the earliest inhabitants of the Americas were most closely related to people in the Altai Mountain reagion of Asia. We still don’t know how they made their way around or through the glaciers.
This is a very cool result, but there’s more to come.
Photo credits: Dennis LeRoy Jenkins/Associated Press/Los Angeles Times; About.com
Update (4/5/08): A linguistic link has been found between Central Asia and North America. Linguists have found that the Siberian Ket language is related to the Na-Dene family of North American languages, which include Athabaskan, Tlingit, Apache and Navajo. This is the first time a link has been demonstrated between Asian and North American languages.