From the Toronto, Canada The Globe and Mail:
Footprints uncovered off B.C. coast could be oldest in North America
More than 13,000 years ago, two adults and a child walked around a fire pit on Calvert Island, off the coast of British Columbia.
The footprints they left in soft clay near the shore were soon covered with black sand, which hid them until a team of archeologists led by Dr. Daryl Fedje and Dr. Duncan McLaren unearthed them recently, exposing what are believed to be the oldest footprints ever found in North America.
The find adds to a growing body of evidence that the first people didn’t arrive in the Americas via an ice-free corridor east of the Rockies about 12,000 years ago, but rather followed a route down the Pacific Coast much earlier.
“It makes the hair on the back of your head stand up,” Dr. McLaren said of the moment the archeologists from the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria made their discovery.
A bit more:
The first find was made by Dr. Fedje last year, but it was an obscure, single print and its age wasn’t known. The pit was closed up at the end of the season before radiocarbon dating was done. Over the winter they got the first evidence they were looking at something extremely old.
“It came back at 13,200 years ago,” Dr. McLaren said.
“This year we decided to go back and open up the same area … and that’s where we discovered a [fire] hearth feature and a dozen footprints … I’m certain there’s more there,” he said. “Some are obscure and some are overlapping. But in some cases you could see individual toes and heels.”
This will change a few textbooks...
Leave a comment