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posted by martyb on Sunday May 15 2016, @08:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the Hey,-Gronk!-Pass-me-a-rib! dept.

Stone tools and mastodon bones found in Florida have pushed back the origin of human settlers in the region:

Stone tools and bones from a butchered mastodon, found at the bottom of a river in Florida, are shaking up the known history of humans in the region. A four-year investigation of the site has firmly concluded that humans lived there and, in particular, made a meal of a mastodon 14,550 years ago. This is more than a millennium earlier than humans were thought to have settled the south-eastern US.

The findings are reported in the open access journal Science Advances [open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600375]. They reinforce the idea that humans settled the Americas well before the Clovis people arrived about 13,000 years ago. For many years, the Clovis were thought to have been "the first Americans".

Additional coverage on Ars Technica .


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @08:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @08:44AM (#346359)

    Yes, there was another race... a highly sophisticated species of shaggy giants
    who made repeated trips to our world over a period of several Drahn.
    They even installed a broadcasting satellite in orbit around our world
    which let us talk with them whenever we wanted. They were called the
    the
    I'm sorry, I can't remember their names. It was a long, long time ago.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @11:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @11:35AM (#346384)

      Long Live the "I'm sorry, I can't remember their names"!

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 15 2016, @03:56PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 15 2016, @03:56PM (#346445) Journal

      They were called the
      the
      I'm sorry, I can't remember their names. It was a long, long time ago.

      The Alzheimers?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by archfeld on Sunday May 15 2016, @07:43PM

        by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Sunday May 15 2016, @07:43PM (#346509) Journal

        I was thinking more like the Flintstones and the Rubbles. The were skilled stone workers and gifted animal trainers, employing a wide variety of prehistoric animals in their day to day lives. I understand they composed some snappy tunes as well.

        Yabba Dabba Doo

        --
        For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday May 15 2016, @05:23PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Sunday May 15 2016, @05:23PM (#346472)

    Not sure what this story has to do with humans but I am very disconcerted that mastodons were sad enough to make stone tools just to commit suicide in such a brutal manner.

    • (Score: 2) by rts008 on Sunday May 15 2016, @05:59PM

      by rts008 (3001) on Sunday May 15 2016, @05:59PM (#346482)

      ...mastodons were sad enough to make stone tools just to commit suicide in such a brutal manner.

      They were fine, idyllic even, until religion was invented by a small pack(ah durm) of trouble makers and rabble-rousers vying to control the herd for their own gain. ;-)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15 2016, @06:21PM (#346490)

    When she hung that order of ribs on the side of your car, the whole thing might tip over.[1] [archive.is]

    [1] S/N's comment engine is still stripping out quote marks from URLs.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday May 15 2016, @11:52PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday May 15 2016, @11:52PM (#346596) Journal

    "This is more than a millennium earlier than humans were thought to have settled the south-eastern US," says the summary. However I found an excerpt from the book Paleoamerican Origins: Beyond Clovis [sc.edu] which says of a site near Topper, South Carolina:

    In sum, unusual microlithic artifacts associated with a smash-core technology have been found in a stratified deposit underneath Clovis-age sediments and Clovis-related lithic technology. OSL dating alone indicates these artifacts are in excess of 15,000 calendar years old; the paleosol lying between the Clovis materials and the Pleistocene alluvium would add 2000 to 4000 years to that.

    It was linked from a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] that mentions some other places in the Americas where early humans left traces. The discoveries in Brazil may be as much as 60,000 years old.