The discovery of stone tools found in a Florida river show that humans settled the southeastern United States far earlier than previously believed.
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That happened perhaps by as much as 1,500 years, according to a team of scientists that includes a University of Michigan paleontologist.
Michael Waters of Texas A&M University and Jessi Halligan of Florida State University led a research team that also included U-M's Daniel Fisher and scientists from the University of Minnesota, University of Texas, University of Arizona, Stafford Research Laboratories in Colorado, Aucilla Research Institute in Florida, and Exeter and Cambridge universities in the United Kingdom.
The researchers excavated the Page-Ladson site near Tallahassee, an archaeological site that is 26 feet underwater in a sinkhole on the Aucilla River.
It was named Page-Ladson after Buddy Page, a former Navy Seal diver who first brought the site to the attention of archaeologists, and the Ladson family, owners of the property.
The site was first investigated from 1987 to 1997 by James Dunbar and David Webb. But their original findings, which included eight stone tools and a mastodon tusk with apparent cut marks, were dismissed.
U-M's Fisher reassembled and re-examined the tusk and concluded that the original interpretation—that the deep, parallel grooves in the surface of the tusk are cut marks made by humans using stone tools to remove the tusk from the skull—is correct.
"These grooves are clearly the result of human activity and, together with new radiocarbon dates, they indicate that humans were processing a mastodon carcass in what is now the southeastern United States much earlier than was generally accepted," said Fisher, director of the U-M Museum of Paleontology and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
"In addition, our work provides strong evidence that early human hunters did not hunt mastodons to extinction as quickly as supporters of the so-called 'Blitzkrieg' hypothesis have argued," Fisher said.
"Instead, the evidence from this site shows that humans and megafauna coexisted for at least 2,000 years." ■