Mystery Deepens: Idaho Artifacts Challenge What We Know About North America’s Earliest Inhabitants
The discovery refutes the long-held theory that North America’s first humans stepped arrived some 13,000 years ago and that they did so by walking the ice-free land bridge between North America and Asia.
The excavation site has spanned 23 feet by 43 feet between 2009 and 2018. The team uncovered 189 artifacts in total, including 27 stone tools and 161 pieces of debris from the production of stone tools and weapons.
The team also found bone fragments from an extinct horse. The horse’s remains were found encircled by numerous stone tools not too far from what is believed to have once been a fire pit. This placement suggests that the early humans had killed, cooked, and ate the horse, and could be “the earliest radiocarbon-dated evidence of people interacting with extinct animals in North America.”
These finds all together, which were published in the journal Science, suggest that humans existed in Idaho around 16,000 years ago — over a thousand years earlier than when the Bering Land Bridge would have opened up.
Bureau of Land Management/FlickrThe new findings at Cooper’s Ferry have renewed debate over the migration pattern of the first human settlers.
Lead study author Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, told LiveScience that his team’s findings have “refuted the hypothesis of the ice-free corridor,” and that they lend “great support to the idea that people came down the Pacific Coast instead.”
What’s even more intriguing is that the researchers suggest some of the tools found at Cooper’s Ferry appear similar to those found in northern Japan during a similar time period.
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