American prehistory has long had its roots in the Clovis culture, so named after a site in New Mexico where 13,500-year-old artifacts were discovered in 1929 – including shaped stone projectile points. lanceolate. But the primacy of Clovis is now in question, with the discovery of many older sites – sometimes disputed – in North and South America, as in Mesoamerica.
The latest discovery is described in Science Advances of December 23, where Loren Davis (of the Department of Anthropology at Oregon State University) and colleagues describe fourteen projectile points found at a site in Idaho, dated to approximately 16,000 years ago. The site of Cooper’s Ferry, on the edge of the Salmon River, was already known. Loren Davis himself started working on it when he was a student in the 1990s. Three years ago, he had already published in Science a study that revealed human occupation between 16,000 and 13,200 years ago, marked by the presence of cut stone projectiles, but the dating remained ambiguous.
Moving about twenty meters apart, his team excavated, between 2012 and 2018, an area that had been partially explored in the 1960s. This time, they found remains of a lithic industry whose stratigraphy and dating seem better established. Carbon-14 dating dates back to around 15,800 years ago the pits where the projectile points were found, mixed with animal remains.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘We believe people were present on the American continent 16,000 years ago’, it’s another to measure it by finding well-made artifacts that they left behind. them “, comments Loren Davis in a press release that accompanies the scientific publication. Because there is no doubt that these are in no way “geofacts”, natural stones that resemble rocks shaped by the human hand, a reproach sometimes made to certain pre-Clovis discoveries.
Tips of assegais or spears
“Regarding the site of Cooper’s Ferry, the lithic material is obviously anthropic and the dating seems solid”, comments Yan Axel Gómez Coutouly, researcher at the joint research and training unit Archeology of the Americas (CNRS, Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne), who did not participate in the study. This was conducted with the collaboration of representatives of the local Nez-Percé tribe, whose oral tradition evokes the old creation of a village on the site.
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