Oldest Human Presence in New World Found in idaho

From Reuters.com
Science News

Idaho artifacts show human presence in Americas 16,600 years ago 

Will Dunham; editing by Sandra Mahler
August 29, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Artifacts including stone tools and animal bone fragments found in Idaho dating back about 16,600 years represent what may be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas and offer insight into the routes people took as they spread into the New World.

Scientists on Thursday said they used a technique called radiocarbon dating to determine the age of artifacts unearthed at an archeological site called Cooper’s Ferry along the Salmon River in western Idaho near the town of Cottonwood.

People were present there at a time when large expanses of North America were covered by massive ice sheets, and big mammals such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, the giant short-faced bear, horses, bison and camels roamed the continent’s Ice Age landscape.

"The Cooper’s Ferry site contains the earliest radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence in the Americas,” said Oregon State University anthropology professor Loren Davis, who led the study published in the journal Science.

Based on this evidence, people first lived at the site, which was situated south of the continental ice sheets present at the time, between about 16,600 and 15,300 years ago and returned to live there multiple times until about 13,300 years ago, Davis added.

The oldest artifacts included four sharp stone flake tools used for cutting and scraping and 43 flakes of stone left over from making stone tools, as well as animal bone fragments and horse tooth fragments. Also found at the site were charcoal, fire-cracked rock, a hearth and food-processing evidence.

Our species first appeared in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago and later trekked worldwide. There has been a scientific debate about when humans first entered the Americas, crossing the former land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska.

The new findings bolster the hypothesis that people in the initial migration into the Americas followed a route down the Pacific coast rather than a route through an inland ice-free corridor as some scientists have argued. [My Note:  Um, why could the ancient migrants not have done both?  To my knowledge, the real estate known as the state of "Idaho" was never on the Pacific Coast, neither during the most recent Ice Age that ended approximately 11,000 years ago or at any other time when migrants from Siberia would have been crossing the land bridge.]

"Cooper’s Ferry is located in the upper Columbia River basin. The Columbia River would provide the first Americans their first route to interior lands south of the continental ice sheets,” Davis said. [My Note:  Why is this any different than saying that the migrants took an ice-free corridor to the interior?  Because they were on water (a river), even though it was not on the coast?  This doesn't make sense to me.  Further, unless the Columbia River was extended further east to Cooper's Ferry site back then than it is today, it is incorrect to say that the ancient migrants took the Columbia River to the site of modern-day Cooper's Ferry, which is on the Salmon River off of the Snake River, not the Columbia - see the maps I added below.]

"The people who occupied the Cooper’s Ferry site pursued a hunting and gathering lifeway most likely as small groups of people, likely fewer than 25 people in a group, who made multiple movements each year to access key resources as they were available,” Davis said.

Certain stone projectile points, which would have been attached to the ends of spears or dart shafts, closely resembled examples found in northern Japan dating a bit earlier than at the Cooper’s Ferry site, the researchers said.  [My Note:  So what would have prevented these early "Japanese" people from hopping into boats and following the ice coastline all the way to North America, and then hopping off at the Columbia River?]

With headwaters in British Columbia, it is the biggest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean from North America, opening into the ocean near Astoria, Oregon.

 "The people who occupied the Cooper’s Ferry site pursued a hunting and gathering lifeway most likely as small groups of people, likely fewer than 25 people in a group, who made multiple movements each year to access key resources as they were available,” Davis said.

Certain stone projectile points, which would have been attached to the ends of spears or dart shafts, closely resembled examples found in northern Japan dating a bit earlier than at the Cooper’s Ferry site, the researchers said.

"We hypothesize that this may signal a cultural connection between early peoples who lived around the northern Pacific Rim, and that traditional technological ideas spread from northeastern Asia into North America at the end of the last glacial period,” Davis said.

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I added the following maps for clarity:

Source:  Americanrivers.org, Columbia River watershed with the Snake River highlighted in yellow
and the Columbia River highlighted in blue.

Ancient humans may have moved by boat down the coast, and turned left up the Columbia, following the river to its tributaries and their eventual home at Cooper's Ferry.

Teresa Hall/Oregon State University.  Source:  obp.org article:  North America's Oldest Human Artifacts Found in Idaho.