We cognize that mankind reached North America between 40000 and 16000 yr ago … and that ’s about all we know for certain . Anything in American prehistory before about 10000 years ago stay deeply controversial . But some mastodon bones found in the seventies recently revealed major clues .
The orthodox perspective of North American prehistory is that the one-time cultivation was the Clovis mass , cite after a serial of discoveries in the later thirties in Clovis , New Mexico . date stamp back close to 13,000 years , the Clovis civilisation is known from their classifiable cock designs , which they made from pearl and tusk . For the last few decades , archaeologists have argued that it was the Clovis culture that migrate from Asia to the Americas , either over the Bering land bridge orby boats .
https://gizmodo.com/15-000-year-old-campsite-in-texas-challenges-convention-5785151
A identification number of subsequent finds and studies have challenge this so - called “ Clovis first ” surmise , but get hold classic cogent evidence of pre - Clovis cultures has remained problematical . Now researchers at Texas A&M and the University of Copenhagen have teamed up to pop the question what could be clinching evidence that the Americas were indeed inhabited before the emergence of the Clovis culture .
Their inquiry rests on new analysis of mastodon fossils first discovered in the seventies . Crucially , one of the mastodon ’s finger cymbals was pierce by a projectile pointedness , itself made from the bones of some other mastodon . That means that this mastodon was kill by humankind , and that it must have dwell at a fourth dimension that the Americas were inhabited . Back in the 1970s , archaeologist dated the bones to 14,000 years old , meaning it predated Clovis .
But those findings were controversial in the larger archeological community , with many arguing that there was a dating error . After all , there is n’t that much departure between 13,000 and 14,000 years , and even as diminished a error as that would imply it dated to the same clock time as Clovis .
However , the Copenhagen and Texas A&M researcher have been able to bring the full cortege of twenty-first century science to date the mammoth bone , including DNA analysis , protein sequencing , advanced computer technology , Carbon-14 dating , and comparing with other , more definitively see mastodon findings from other sites .
After all those thorough tests , lead researcher Eske Willerslev is convinced that the pearl are at least 13,800 years old . Whoever kill this mastodon all those millennium ago , it was n’t the Clovis finish . It also means that mastodons were n’t directly hunted to extinction by the Clovis , as had antecedently been suggested . Humans and megafauna would have shared many hundred of comparatively passive coexistence before they were finally driven to extinction .
Willerslev explain what this all means :
“ Our research now establish that other hunters were present at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis culture . Therefore , it was not a sudden war or a quick slaughtering of the mastodons by the Clovis culture , which made the species evaporate . We can now close that the hunt for the animals stretched out over a much longer period of time . At this time , however , we do not know if it was the Isle of Man - made hunt for the mastodons , mammoth and other enceinte animals from the so - telephone mega - fauna , which induce them to become nonextant and disappear . Maybe the reason was something consummate different , for instance the mood . ”
Previous research by Willerslev and his squad indicates that the first hint of human comportment in the Americas locomote back at least 14,340 year . We have a go at it very little about these people , who quite in all probability were the original emigre from Asia , but it ’s certainly potential that after several one C of living in the Americas they began to germinate Clovis technology . The precise story of ancient American prehistory remain mystical , but we at least be intimate it ’s longer and more complex than we previously guess .
Read the full scientific paper viaScience . Artist ’s impression of mastodon byCharles R. Knightfrom 1897 .
ArchaeologyFossilMastodonScience
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