New find extends back our knowledge of earliest identified North Americans

15,000-year-old spear point found in Texas/Center for the Study of the First Americans/Texas A&M

Artifacts have been found from a group that may have contributed to the later and better known Clovis culture:

“We have discovered two previously unknown spearpoint styles that predate Clovis,” says study coauthor and archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Finding these artifacts in sediment showing a clear progression from stemmed points to a triangular point to Clovis points over a roughly 2,000-year period raises the likelihood that one spearpoint style led to the next, Waters holds.

Similar stemmed spearpoints dating to as early as around 14,000 years ago have been found in parts of the western United States (SN: 8/11/12, p. 15). Several spearpoints found at the Gault site in Central Texas, dating to 16,700 years ago or more, also look similar to the stemmed spearpoints from Buttermilk Creek, Waters says.

Early American settlers crafted stemmed spearpoints and probably traveled down the Pacific coast starting around 16,000 years ago, the researchers contend. Bruce Bower, “Ancient Clovis people may have taken tool cues from earlier Americans” at Science News

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See also: Were humans in North America 130,000 years ago? Some evidence considered

Were there humans in North America 100 kya? Or was the find just heavy construction equipment damage?

First North Americans might have been Neanderthals, 130 kya…

and

Were there humans in North America 100 thousand years ago?

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