New information on state’s earliest inhabitants is found
The clear, deep water laps against the shores of Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park on one side and the edge of northern Minnesota wilderness on the other.
The Ojibwe name for what the glaciers created is Mookomaan Zaaga’igan, while the French fur traders called it Lac des Couteaux, or Lake of Knives. It’s on the shores of this remote lake, at least 15 miles from the nearest road and in water divided by the U.S.-Canada border, where Minnesota’s earliest history is being uncovered.
Those retreating glaciers left a scoured landscape of exposed siltstone, a silica-infused mud that hardened for millions of years into a high-quality source for Paleo-Indian stone toolmaking. And thousands of years after the last siltstone was harvested from Knife Lake quarries, researchers from St. Cloud State University are letting that stone speak for the first time about the earliest inhabitants of Minnesota.
“It’s rewriting the history for this area of Minnesota. We’re making a major contribution in understanding the very earliest cultures of humans to live in this part of the state,” said Mark Muniz, associate professor of anthropology at St. Cloud State.
Muniz and three fellow researchers paddled and portaged to Knife Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in August to continue digging for evidence that Paleo-Indians drawn to Knife Lake siltstone were the first humans to inhabit Minnesota.
If his theory is correct - and he found more evidence this summer to support
it - Paleo-Indians first inhabited far northern Minnesota as glaciers receded 11,000-12,500 years ago. That would run contrary to the belief that the area had not yet recovered enough to support plants and animals after being scoured by glaciers. It would also be contrary to the thought that the first people to live in the Arrowhead region arrived hundreds, if not thousands, of years after Paleo-Indians appeared in the southern part of the state.
Time, however, isn’t on the side of Muniz. The area he is surveying was made accessible only by a huge storm in July 1999 that led to prescribed burns in the BWCAW in 2005.
Read more here:twincities.com