[Aztlan] More on Pre-Clovis in Minnesota

[michael ruggeri]

Archaeologists Find Ancient Stone Tools
The Associated Press
By STEVE KARNOWSKI
January 12, 2007

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It's an extraordinary claim and it requires some extraordinary evidence

What appear to be crude stone tools may provide evidence that people  
lived in Minnesota 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, which if confirmed  
would make them among the oldest human artifacts ever found in North  
America, archaeologists said Friday.
Archaeologists in the northern Minnesota town of Walker dug up the  
items, which appear to be beveled scrapers, choppers, a crude knife  
and several flakes that could have been used for cutting, said  
Colleen Wells, field director for the Leech Lake Heritage Sites Program.
'They don't look like much,' Wells acknowledged. 'They don't look  
pretty.'
Several archaeological experts who weren't involved with the dig  
expressed a healthy dose of skepticism, but they acknowledged they  
were also intrigued.
Wells and other archaeologists discovered around 50 objects this past  
year while investigating a route for a planned road that would serve  
a major community development project in Walker. The items were found  
beneath a layer of glacial deposits that had been covered by  
windblown deposits. Based on what's known about the geology of the  
area, they believe the objects are between 13,000 and 15,000 years old.
'The finding is intriguing but it really needs to have its precise  
age nailed down and more needs to be known of the artifacts,' said  
David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in  
Dallas.
Much more research needs to be done to allow firm conclusions, Wells  
and her colleagues acknowledged. 'It's bound to be controversial,'  
said Matt Mattson, another archaeologist on the project.
Not only do the age of the items and the soil in which they were  
found need to be confirmed, it must also be determined whether the  
objects are really human-made artifacts or merely rocks that were  
chipped in interesting ways by glaciers during the Ice Age. And it's  
not yet certain if the items were left at the site by humans, or  
carried there by glaciers or flowing water.
Other researchers have found that that part of Minnesota apparently  
was something of an 'oasis' around 13,000 years ago, an area free of  
ice cover with shifting glaciers on most sides but with an access  
route to the southeast, Mattson said.
Tom Dillehay, chairman of the anthropology department at Vanderbilt  
University in Nashville, Tenn., was intrigued by the edge he saw on a  
photo of one of the objects found in Walker, saying it could have  
been chipped by a human.
'It's probably worth protecting the site and going back in and more  
systematically excavating with the geologists and other disciplines  
to see if it's a real site,' he said.
Pat Everson, head of archaeology for the Minnesota Historical  
Society, said she hadn't been to the site or seen the artifacts  
personally, but she'd read the reports, knows the archaeologists  
involved and considers them 'perfectly credible.' Still, she counted  
herself among the skeptics.
'It's an extraordinary claim and it requires some extraordinary  
evidence,' Everson said. 'But it's certainly worth pursuing.'
Several experts agreed it is possible people were in Minnesota that  
long ago.
'It seems to be there is an increasing body of science that there  
were stone stools and people here in that time period in North  
America,' said Dan Rogers, chairman of the anthropology department at  
the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution  
in Washington.
The long-accepted theory was that people first arrived in the Western  
Hemisphere 11,200 years ago _ corresponding with the age of  
arrowheads found in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M. _ via a land bridge  
from Asia over what is now the Bering Strait.
But a consensus is emerging that some humans arrived thousands of  
years earlier, even if scientists disagree on just how much earlier.  
And several agreed that if the Minnesota objects do turn out to be  
13,000- to 15,000-year-old tools, they'd be among the oldest human  
artifacts ever found in North America.
That's why the local archaeologists are hoping to get back into the  
site after this winter, and hope to work out a way with the city of  
Walker to preserve it for sometime in the future when more advanced  
testing methods might be available.
'Once it's gone it's gone,' Mattson said. 'We're looking at  
absolutely irreplaceable links in human history here. Once it's gone  
there's no retrieving it.'

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.




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