Rimrock Draw Rockshelter in southeastern Oregon, where the 18,000-year-old teeth and tools were unearthed. (Image credit: Greg Shine/BLM; (CC BY 2.0))
LiveScience has a story about some new discoveries of human artifacts in the Pacific Northwest. Archaeologists made the discoveries at the site of Rimrock Draw in Oregon. They have been excavating a stone shelter there for the last few years. More details can be found in a synopsis prepared by Patrick O'Grady of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon.
Stone tools and the teeth of an extinct camel and bison discovered in central Oregon show that people were living in North America 18,250 years ago, new research finds. Although this is not the earliest date for human occupation of the Americas that has been proposed, the finding, which is not yet published in a peer-reviewed study, appears to be thousands of years older than any other archaeological site in Oregon.
Archaeologists made the discovery at the site of Rimrock Draw, which includes a rock shelter that researchers have been excavating since 2011 under a partnership with the Bureau of Land Management. Initial investigations found stone tools from the Paleo-Indian period (15000 B.C. to 7000 B.C.), but the geology of the site suggested that there were sediment layers dating to even earlier.
