In what may be one of the most significant discoveries ever in archaeology in the Americas, researchers on Wednesday said stone tools and broken mastodon bones unearthed in California show humans had reached the Americas by about 1,30,000 years ago, far earlier than previously known.
The researchers called five rudimentary tools — hammerstones and anvils — discovered in San Diego County alongside fossil bones from the prehistoric elephant relative compelling evidence, though circumstantial, for the presence of either our species or an extinct cousin like Neanderthals.
San Diego Natural History Museum palaeontologist Tom Demşrş said until now, the oldest widely accepted date for human presence in the New World was 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, making the San Diego site nearly 10 times older.
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The finding would radically rewrite the understanding of when humans reached the New World, through some scientists not involved in the study voiced scepticism.
“If the date of 1,30,000 years old is genuine, then this is one of the biggest discoveries in American archaeology,” acoording to University of Southampton palaeolithic archaeologist John McNabb, who was not involved in the research He called himself “still a little sceptical.”
No human skeletal remains were found. But the stone tools’ wear and impact marks and the way in which mastodon limb bones and molars were broken, apparently in a deliberate manner shortly after the animal’s death, convinced the researchers humans were responsible. They performed experiments using comparable tools on elephant bones and produced similar fracture patterns.
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State-of-the-art methods
“People were here breaking up the limb bones of this mastodon, removing some of the big, thick pieces of mastodon limb bones, probably to make tools out of, and they may have also been extracting some of the marrow for food,” said archaeologist Steven Holen of the Centre for American Paleolithic Research in South Dakota.
U.S. Geological Survey geologist James Paces used state-of-the-art dating methods to determine the mastodon bones, tooth enamel and tusks were 131,000 years old, plus or minus about 9,000 years.