Thirty feet beneath the murky waters of the Aucilla River, about 40 miles southeast of Tallahassee, Fla., archaeologists have found evidence of some of the earliest known humans in the Americas.
In submerged sediments that date back 14,550 years, a team of scuba-diving researchers has uncovered six stone artifacts — including knives and flaked pieces of rock — at the underwater site known as Page-Ladson. They also pulled up a mastodon tusk with cut marks on it that experts say were made when these ancient people butchered its carcass alongside a lake bed.
The findings, published Friday in Science Advances, provide the first indication that communities of hunter-gatherers were living in the southeast United States 1,500 years earlier than many scientists previously believed, suggesting a new story line for when and how people first came to the Americas.
“We are getting enough data now, particularly on the East Coast, to know that people have been around here for a very long time,” said Dennis Stanford, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the work.
From the 1930s through the early 2000s, the dominant narrative among archaeologists held that the first Americans were members of the so-called Clovis culture. These pioneers left their distinctive spearheads scattered across a region that now covers the United States, Mexico and northern South America, almost like archaeological bread crumbs.
Most researchers believed members of this group were the descendants of big game hunters who followed their prey across the Bering land bridge from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 or 14,000 years ago. From there, they migrated down into Canada and very quickly spread across the enormous land mass to the south.
“If you disagreed with that you were relegated to being on the periphery of the science community,” said Dennis Jenkins, senior research archaeologist at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the Florida discovery. “You were seen as a lunatic, or way out there on the fringe.”
But over the past few decades, persuasive challenges to the Clovis-First narrative have begun to emerge.
In 1997, for instance, researchers confirmed that an archaeological site in Chile held evidence of human activity dating back to 14,500 years ago — a full millennium before the Clovis-First theory would allow. In 2002, Jenkins led an excavation that unearthed 14,300-year-old fossilized human feces in Oregon’s Paisley caves. A handful of other pre-Clovis sites popped up too, including one in Wisconsin and another in Texas.
The 14,500-year-old butchered mastodon at Page-Ladson is now among the two or three oldest archaeological sites in the New World, and the oldest in the American southeast.
“It’s important because it adds another site to the very small list of well-dated pre-Clovis sites,” Jenkins said. “We don’t find much evidence of these people because there weren’t very many of them.”