The remains of two mammoths discovered in New Mexico show that humans lived in North America much earlier than thought. Credit: NPS.
Phys.org has a story about early humans in North America. It's long been thought that humans arrived in North America about 12,000 maybe 15000 years ago. There has been some spare evidence of a much earlier arrival, which was often played off as incorrect dating or just incorrect evidence. Now a team from the University of Texas at Austin has published a research that would push the date of arrive to at least 37,000 years ago! The paper appeared in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
About 37,000 years ago, a mother mammoth and her calf met their end at the hands of human beings.
Bones from the butchering site record how humans shaped pieces of their long bones into disposable blades to break down their carcasses, and rendered their fat over a fire. But a key detail sets this site apart from others from this era. It's in New Mexico—a place where most archaeological evidence does not place humans until tens of thousands of years later.
A recent study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Austin finds that the site offers some of the most conclusive evidence for humans settling in North America much earlier than conventionally thought.
The researchers revealed a wealth of evidence rarely found in one place. It includes fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. And thanks to carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones, the site also comes with a settled age of 36,250 to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.
"What we've got is amazing," said lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. "It's not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side. It's all busted up. But that's what the story is."
