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History exists in the past, but it does not mean it's static. New findings, published Wednesday in Science Advances, The discovery of a dozen projectile points at the Debra L. Friedkin site from the Buttermilk Creek complex in Central Texas. These spearheads date back 13,500 years ago, making them possible the oldest weapons in North America, and also painting a more complex picture of what we previously thought about the continent's first humans.
Spear points are a pretty iconic aspect of the Clovis, an old culture of Paeloamerican hunter-gatherers. These points typically date back to between 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, and are lanceolate (leaf-shaped) points made of stone, replete with a concave base that allows them to attach to a spear's tip. So the discovery of spear points that the Clovis is quite a big deal.
Michael Waters, a geologist at Texas A & M University and the lead author of the new study, said: "This discovery is important for almost all sites have stone tools, but spear points have yet to be found. "The dream has always been diagnosed artificially-like projectile points-that can be recognized as older than Clovis." Waters and his colleagues have dug at Buttermilk Creek for many years now. "We were always hoping to someday find a projectile point, but in archeology, you get what you get."
It looks like they finally got it. In this latest excavation, Waters and his team unearthed hundreds of thousands of pre-Clovis objects from the Buttermilk Creek site, including hundreds of tools. They are fragmented and complete projectile points, coming in two types: stemmed points between 13,500 and 15,500 years ago, and triangular lanceolate points that are between 13,500 and 14,000 years old. All of them are definitely older than one-of-a-kind Clovis points.
"When we first found that intact, we have lost our minds," says Joshua Keene, a Texas A & M researcher and co-author of the study. "We had never seen anything like it, at least not in Texas!"
According to Waters, the gold standard for this type of work is to be found in the clovis objects where the Clovis objects sit: the lower layer, the older the artifact. The first article of the report is based on the fact that the entire prehistoric record of Central Texas is fairly well documented. Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating, in which light is used to date an absolute date for geological sediments.
"A big question that has not been answered until now, what did pre-Clovis technology look like?" Says Keene. The new objects are distinct from the big leaf-shaped Clovis points, and they are particularly unique in the history of the jigsaw puzzle.
So what do the pre-Clovis points mean about human history in North America? Waters emphasizes that we know for sure Clovis originates in North America, south of the continental ice sheets, and that people do not carry Clovis points from Alaska to the unglaciated portions of North America.
Clovis lanceolate points may be developed by Clovis lanceolate. Now, a second migration of another culture may have arrived at the scene, carrying the triangular lanceolate that was soon developed in the Clovis point.
The findings "give new strength to the theory that there are many migrations of people in the world, rather than just one, and that some of the earliest groups moved to Texas, of all places," Keene says. "These populations pre-dated Clovis, or possibly even turned into Clovis."
The new study also sheds a spotlight on the Buttermilk site was early migrants. "They're coming to Friedkin because of the extreme abundance of high-quality chert for making stone tools," says Keene. "In fact, we have a lot of evidence that Friedkin has been a popular re-tooling spot for nearly 16,000 years."
"I think they've done an amazing job in dating the deposits in the artifacts" and providing a "secure chronology," says Ben Marwick, an archeologist based at the University of Washington who was not involved with the study. "They've invested a lot of effort and it's paid off very well, and I really think that's a strength of the study."
That being said, Marwick also points out the findings have their limitations. "The critical artifacts [the authors] their findings on are small in number. It leaves an unanswered question of whether this is a real pattern of an early age, or if it's just a one-off spell of thing, and maybe there's a small number of people deciding to make these spells. of artifacts one afternoon. "
Marwick also notes there is not a very strong description of the present clay deposits in the paper, and that pictures to show some vertical cracks in the layers. "It looks like there might be some potential for some of these artifacts to move through the cracks. It's possible some of the artifacts might have moved down, "and we are not as old as we might really believe. Marwick has conducted research in the field of archeological sites in Australia, where he and his team have had an interest in microscopic analysis and other testing. "My sense is that it's been done here, and I'd look forward to seeing you before I get too excited about some of the claims."
Lastly, while Marwick says it 's possible the points originate from a separate group of migrants, he' s hesitant to put a lot of things in that interpretation. "We know that one group can make many different kinds of artifacts. It's not always really that the different kinds of artifacts mean different kinds of cultural groups. "There are only a handful of sites within North America that scientists are able to work with, so it's difficult to come to conclusions the history of early human migrants in North America. He's hopeful more research can be found in these studies or in the field of anthropology.
Nevertheless, Marwick is encouraged by the general implication of the findings that early technologies in the Americas are more diverse than we previously thought. "It's a very important part of this new paper," he says.
"The peopling of the Americas during the last Ice Age was a complex process," says Waters. "This complexity is already seen in the genetic record. Now, we are starting to see this complexity mirrored in the archaeological record. "
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