Mastodon Meal Scraps Revise US Prehistory
“[It] was an impossible date 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, lead author of the new study and assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University.
That view, however, has gradually been revised as more and more evidence accumulates that humans arrived thousands of years earlier - perhaps as early as 16,000 years ago, when the last ice age was only beginning to thaw.
But that evidence is sparsely scattered across the continent, and the new study provides the first comprehensive claim for such a presence in the south-east of the US.