Scientists say a stone knife and other artifacts found deep underwater in a Florida sinkhole show people lived in that area about 14,500 years ago.
That makes the ancient sinkhole the earliest well-documented site for human presence in the southeastern US, and important for understanding the settling of the Americas, experts said.
The findings confirm claims made more than a decade ago about the site, about 48km southeast of Tallahassee. At that time, researchers reported evidence that humans were there about 14,400 years ago. However, in an era when such an old date was widely considered impossible, other experts disputed the evidence, said Mike Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station.
Photo: Reuters
The sinkhole was “just politely ignored,” he said.
Waters was among a new team of scientists who excavated there from 2012 to 2014. They report finding the knife and stone flakes in a paper released on Friday by the journal Science Advances. The new work offers “far better” evidence for early humans than the earlier research did, he said.
The sinkhole is nearly 61m wide. In ancient times, it had a shallow pond at the bottom. That offered fresh water and a gathering point for animals, which “probably would have been easy pickings” for hunters, who saw them trapped in the deep depression, Waters said.
Photo: AP
Today, the sinkhole is filled with about 9m of water, and it took divers equipped with head-mounted lights to look for artifacts.
It was “as dark as the inside of a cow, literally no light at all,” said Jessi Halligan, the lead diving scientist and an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
They found the knife while digging with a trowel. It is about 5cm long and 2.5cm wide, sharpened on both sides.
To determine its age, the researchers used nearby mastodon dung, which contained twigs that could be analyzed. The twigs, and therefore the knife, were found to be about 14,550 years old.
Man-made stone flakes were found to be about the same age. The scientists also examined a mastodon tusk recovered in 1993, and confirmed that its long, deep grooves were made by people, probably as they worked to remove the tusk from a skull.
The first people in North America are thought to have crossed a now-submerged land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. From there, people spread southward. Waters said the age of the sinkhole artifacts adds to evidence that people might have migrated south from Alaska as early as 16,000 years ago by boat along the coast, because inland Canada was blocked by ice sheets until 2,000 years later.
Halligan said the ancient visitors to the sinkhole could have been the Southeast’s first snowbirds, moving south for the winter and north for the summer. They could have followed mastodons, whose remains have been found as far north as Kentucky, she said.
“They were very smart about local plants and local animals and migration patterns,” she said.
In US archaeology, sites showing signs of human presence more than about 13,000 years are called “pre-Clovis,” as they predate the Clovis era of widespread human occupation.
Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History said that he ranked the sinkhole with two locations in Pennsylvania and Virginia as “the best-dated and oldest pre-Clovis sites yet found in North America.”
While the other two sites are older, “the Florida site has a major role to play in learning the story of the peopling of the Americas,” said Stanford, who did not participate in the research.
Another expert, James Adovasio of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton agreed, saying it promises to shed light on “early Native American lifestyle in an environment where these lifestyles are very poorly defined.”
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number