Buttermilk Creek TX People 15kya
Evidence for Neanderthal in America
by Xeno, Xenophilia, March 25, 2011 [here]
The long-held theory of how humans first populated the Americas may have been well and truly broken.
Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of stone tools that predate the technology widely assumed to have been carried by the first settlers.
The discoveries in Texas are seen as compelling evidence that the so-called Clovis culture does not represent America’s original immigrants.
Details of the 15,500-year-old finds are reported in Science magazine.
A number of digs across the Americas in recent decades had already hinted that the “Clovis first” model was in serious trouble.
But the huge collection of well-dated tools excavated from a creek bed 60km (40 miles) northwest of Austin mean the theory is now dead, argue the Science authors.
“This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, ‘hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas’,” Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University anthropologist, told reporters. … [more]
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Texas Site Confirms Pre-Clovis Settlement of the Americas
by Heather Pringle, Science 25 March 2011 Vol. 331 no. 6024 p. 1512 [here]
Summary: Near the headwaters of a small creek, a group of hunter-gatherers made their camp and began to craft stone tools, leaving thousands of sharp stone flakes and chips discarded on the ground. At one time or another, similar scenes have played out almost the world over. But the remarkable thing about this one, as detailed on page 1599 of this week’s issue of Science, is that it happened near Buttermilk Creek, Texas-about 15,500 years ago. That’s long before the Clovis hunters, once thought to be the very first people in America, had appeared. The ancient tools also offer a first glimpse into how the distinctive fluted Clovis points may have developed over millennia. Although some previous claims of pre-Clovis artifacts have been controversial, other archaeologists say the new research is highly convincing.
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Michael R. Waters, Steven L. Forman, Thomas A. Jennings, Lee C. Nordt, Steven G. Driese, Joshua M. Feinberg, Joshua L. Keene, Jessi Halligan, Anna Lindquist, James Pierson, Charles T. Hallmark, Michael B. Collins, and James E. Wiederhold (2011) The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas. Science 25 March 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6024 pp. 1599-1603 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201855
Abstract [here]
Compelling archaeological evidence of an occupation older than Clovis (~12.8 to 13.1 thousand years ago) in North America is present at only a few sites, and the stone tool assemblages from these sites are small and varied. The Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, contains an assemblage of 15,528 artifacts that define the Buttermilk Creek Complex, which stratigraphically underlies a Clovis assemblage and dates between ~13.2 and 15.5 thousand years ago. The Buttermilk Creek Complex confirms the emerging view that people occupied the Americas before Clovis and provides a large artifact assemblage to explore Clovis origins.