The oldest weapons discovered in North America and discovered in Texas

Ancient tools that can give historians a glimpse of the history of America have recently been discovered in Texas. Researchers at Texas A & M University made this astonishing discovery during a search of the Debra L. Friedkin site, located just 40 kilometers northwest of Austin.

Archaeologists have been looking for artifacts on the site near Buttermilk Creek for more than a decade – but it is perhaps their most important discovery to date.

Michael Waters, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Early American Studies Center at Texas A & M, and staff members from Baylor University and the University of Texas described the various objects found in a study published in the latest issue of Science Advances. . The team revealed that it had found 3 to 4 inch weapons, including chert spear points, under sediments that were at least 15,500 years old.

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"The discovery is significant because almost all sites prior to Clovis have stone tools, but there are still spearheads. These points were found under a layer of Clovis and Folsom projectile points, "Waters said in a statement Wednesday, noting that the term Clovis describes tools used by people 13,000 years ago. – which can be recognized as older than Clovis and that's what we have on the Friedkin website. "

The Clovis people coined the "Clovis Point", a spear-shaped weapon found in parts of the United States and Mexico. According to Science Daily, for decades the population of Clovis was considered the first to enter the North American continent.

Like Clovis Point, Waters thinks the 15,000-year-old weapons recently discovered in Austin were used to hunt large animals. Their existence may also corroborate the evidence that the first American settlers arrived in the country earlier than predicted by historians.

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"In the last decade, genetic studies of Amerindians and modern prehistoric skeletons have shown that the initial movement of people south of the continental ice sheets had already begun about 15 to 16 ka ago and that it existed. a genetic continuity between the first immigrants entering the Americas and modern Amerindians ", explain the authors of the research. "Archaeological studies over the past 25 years show that the inhabitants of the Americas have successfully occupied about 14 to 15 ka, according to genetic estimates."

However, Waters admits that there is still a lot of research to be done on tools to better understand the people who were traveling in North America at the time.

"The results broaden our understanding of the first peoples to explore and settle in North America," said Waters. "The settlement of the Americas at the end of the last ice age was a complex process and this complexity is visible in their genetic records. We are now beginning to see this complexity reflected in the archaeological archives. "