Underwater Site Shows Snowbirds Hit Florida 14,500 Years Ago
Once again the evidence once finally found puts mankind farther, earlier than previously thought. Snowbirds may imply migration. Not sure they have any evidence for back and forth.
People were hunting and foraging in what is now Florida 14,500 years ago, archaeologists said Friday in a discovery that may settle one debate over when the earliest Americans arrived.
The team used scuba gear to dive into a murky, 20-foot-deep hole in a river to recover the stone tools, mastodon bones and other artifacts that they show people had pushed all the way across the continent thousands of years before conventional wisdom had them even arriving in North America.
The site, called Page-Ladson, had been known for years but the discovery of what appeared to be butchered mastodon tusks and stone tools was largely dismissed by the scientific community. The team, led by Jessi Halligan of Florida State University, went back starting in 2012.
Halligan is a scuba diver and she and Waters assembled a team of experts to do an underwater dig - a technique not often used in the U.S. except to recover shipwrecks. They had to contend with cold water stained black by tree leaves, which meant they could barely see what they were doing.
More: Underwater Site Shows Snowbirds Hit Florida 14,500 Years Ago - NBC News