Posted: May 14, 2016 8:55 am
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36286548
B.B.C. Article
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.
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".
In fact, the mastodon tusk that is the centrepiece of the Florida haul, complete with apparent cut marks and accompanying tools, was first found and dated in the 1980s - but the discovery gained little traction.
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