Bones And Tools Show Earliest Humans In North America Existed More Than 14,000 Years Ago

A team of Florida State University researchers has found stone tools along with mastodon bones in Florida. The findings give an insight into a startling history of North America----that humans who had settled in the southeastern U.S. existed 1,500 years earlier than thought.

The team happened to find the tools and bones in Aucilla River, now believed to be the oldest known area of human life in southeastern U.S., going back to 14,550 years.

"This is a big deal," said Jessi Halligan, a professor at Florida State University and first author of the study. "There were people here. So how did they live? This has opened up a whole new line of inquiry for us as scientists, as we try to understand the settlement of the Americas."

Halligan and her team found the site between 2012 to 2014. The team excavated the Page-Ladson site that was located at 30 feet below water in an Aucilla River sinkhole.

Although tools and a mastodon tusk had been found in the 1980s and 1990s in a layer that seemed to be more than 14,000 years old, they had been ignored as they were found under water, and people believed that they were "too old to be real."

Retracing their findings at the site, the team discovered a biface, or a knife with two sharp edges that were used to butcher animals, along with a number of other tools. The mastodon tusk from the earlier excavations showed signs of cutting, which indicate that they might have been used by early humans to access the tissue at the base of the skull for food.

"Each tusk this size would have had more than 15 pounds of tender, nutritious tissue in its pulp cavity, and that would certainly have been of value," said Michael Waters from Texas A&M University and co-author of the study. "Another possible reason to extract a tusk is that ancient humans who lived in this same area are known to have used ivory to make weapons."

Radiocarbon dating techniques showed that the artifacts go back 14,550 years, which is earlier than 13,200 years as believed.

"The new discoveries at Page-Ladson show that people were living in the Gulf Coast area much earlier than believed," Waters said.

"It's pretty exciting," Halligan added. "We thought we knew the answers to how and when we got here, but now the story is changing."

The findings were published in the May 13, 2016, issue of the journal Science Advances.