Evidence from Florida archaeological site indicates humans migrated to Americas 1,500 years earlier than previously thought
Page-Ladson is among a handful of archaeological sites that suggest human occupation from more than 13,000 years ago.
A second look at a tusk and tools unearthed from an underwater archaeological site in Florida has revealed that people migrated to the Americas almost 1,500 years earlier than previously believed, researchers said Friday.
The site – known as Page-Ladson – is submerged eight metres a sinkhole on the Aucilla River near Tallahassee, and was first explored in the late 1980s and 1990s.
For over 60 years, archaeologists accepted that Clovis were the first people to occupy the Americas around 13,000 years ago. Today, this viewpoint is changing
Back then, researchers found a mastodon tusk and several stone artefacts that radiocarbon dating showed to be more than 14,400 years old, far older than the remnants found from the Paleo-Indian Clovis culture in North America which tend to be about 11-13,000 years old. But their findings were largely dismissed by scientists.
This “was an impossible age for the scientific community to accept at the time because it was well-accepted that the Americas were colonised by the Clovis people who arrived on the continent over the Bering Land Bridge no longer than 13,500 years ago at the oldest,” said Jessi Halligan of Florida State University.
Halligan led a team that returned to the underwater site from 2012 to 2014 for more excavation work at what experts say is the oldest archaeological site in the south-eastern United States and the oldest submerged one yet discovered in the New World.
Working in dark and murky conditions, they found more bones and a biface stone knife used for butchering, and confirmed – with 71 new radiocarbon dates from the site – that the artefacts date to about 14,550 years ago, according to the report in the journal Science Advances.
