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A 15,000-year-old stemmed point. (Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A & M University) (unknown)
For the long haul of Buttermilk Creek has its way through Texas Hill Country, its spring-fed waters have been carved through the region's dark, dense clays, and so on.
Here, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a human settlement stretching back as far as 15,500 years: hammer stones and broken knives, fragments of fractured tools. And now, scientists say, the Buttermilk Creek complex has been established in North America.
"This is a really fascinating paper," said Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the new study. "It's filling in some of the gaps in the archaeological record regarding the Clovis complex and the histories of the very first peoples in the Americas.
If the projectile was the cellphone of the Pleistocene – an omnipresent technology that shaped the cultures and defined daily life – the Clovis tools were the iPhone X. These points, named for the city in New Mexico where they were first found, featured a fluted bottom and rounded sides tapering to a sharp point.
The distinctive spearheads are scattered throughout the rock record between 10,000 and 13,500 years ago, from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains and as far south as Venezuela. The tools are so ubiquitous that for nearly a century, archaeologists thought that the Clovis tradition represented the first people to arrive in the Americas.
Clovis, and genetic analyzes of modern Native Americans suggest their ancestors crossed over from Asia to Alaska about 20,000 years ago, then migrated down the Pacific coast between 20,000 and 15,000 years before present .
So who exactly were these early Americans?
The new points uncovered at Buttermilk Creek may offer a clue, said Waters, who direct the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A & M University. Because tools are so essential to the tasks of survival – hunting, cooking, building, killing – they can say a great deal about the people who wielded them.
Archaeologists conduct an excavation at the Debra L. Friedkin site near Buttermilk Creek in Texas. (Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A & M University)
In his work, Waters and his colleagues have found Clovis points in a rock dating 13,000 years ago. Below, in older rocks, they uncovered scores of stone point fragments, but no whole spear heads. It was difficult to know if they were looking at older Clovis artifacts, or something entirely different.
Then, in 2015, the archaeologists uncovered two perfectly preserved artifacts: One triangular point, which resembles a predator's sharp tooth, and one lobe-shaped projectile with a tapered, or "stemmed," bottom. With these points, Waters' team was able to make sense of the 10 additional fragments they collected. They seem subtly but significantly different from Clovis and other toolmaking traditions – nor a clear ancestor to the later technology, nor an obvious competitor.
"I just thought, 'Holy cow,'" Waters recalled. "Whenever you do not expect it, it's always very exciting and exhilarating."
They have been made between 13,500 and 15,500 years ago – offering a significant piece of archaeological evidence for a migration to the Americas that predates Clovis.
Waters said: Were the Clovis people descendants of these early inhabitants who came up with a new technical toolmaking? But did they migrate to the continent before scattering their tools across the Americas?
"We're just starting to answer that," Waters said.
Skye Gilham, a Forensic Anthropologist at Blackfeet Community College in Montana, said that the United States and their descendants living today. Findings like Waters ', which provide evidence for her people' s long history in the Americas.
"We have said that we are always here, our homeland," Gilham said. Archeology and Genetics, she said, "reaffirm" that.
Read more:
How did the first Americans get here? A story of boats, bones and ice
The oldest footprints in North America are right where native historians said they should be
Archaeology shocker: Study claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago
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