Ancient Chesapeake site challenges timeline of humans in the Americas

[Judi Lynn]

Story by Carolyn Y. Johnson • 1mo • 11 min read

PARSONS ISLAND, Md. — With the Chesapeake Bay sloshing at his knee-high boots, Darrin Lowery stood back and squinted at a 10-foot-tall bluff rising above a narrow strip of beach. To the untrained eye, this wall of sandy sediment is the unremarkable edge of a modest island southeast of the Bay Bridge.

To Lowery, a coastal geologist, its crumbling layers put the island at the center of one of the most contentious battles in archaeology: when and how humans first made their way into the Americas.

The story of the first Americans has long been a matter of public and scientific fascination, undergirded at times by vicious disagreements. The timeline of when people arrived has shifted earlier in grudging steps over the past century, and scientists today mostly agree people were in the Americas at least 15,000 years ago.o

Lowery’s site and others like it could revise the story again, pushing back the timeline earlier than most experts thought possible. In total, Lowery and a motley crew of collaborators have discovered 286 artifacts from the site on the island’s southwestern edge. The oldest, they reported, was embedded with charcoal dated to more than 22,000 years ago, a time when much of the continent would have been covered in ice sheets.

If Lowery is right, Parsons Island could rewrite American prehistory, opening up a host of new puzzles: How did those people get here? How many waves of early migration were there? And are these mysterious people the ancestors of Native Americans?

More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ancient-chesapeake-site-challenges-timeline-of-humans-in-the-americas/ar-BB1mEqp2

[GreenWave]

1. Wow! I should make the trek over there. Fantastic find.

[Gore1FL]

2. I read that as "cheesecake." It's time to go back to bed. nt

[jaxexpat]

3. Me too, and I've been up for hours.

[Botany]

4. So they found some 20,000 year old crab cakes?

Thanx for posting. We have now found human artifacts and bones from older sites than
the migration across the Land Bridge from Siberia in both S.W. America and now the
Chesapeake area. Science is good.

[wnylib]

5. I think that good places to search for early human presence

in the Americas are 1) Pacific coast Islands and 2) across North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic just south of where the glaciers reached.

If people entered the Americas by boat, which I think they did, some would have continued a southward movement along the Pacific Coast into South America while others moved inland along rivers, streams, and lakes that formed from meltwater just below the glaciers.

Some of the oldest sites suggest that kind of travel pattern, i.e. White Sands, NM and Meadowcroft Rockshelter in western PA just north of Pittsburgh. Now there is this possibility in the Chesapeake Bay area.

The oldest sites were probably covered by ocean water along the Pacific coast when water levels rose from melting glaciers, so islands off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California would be interesting places to search. Also, the Baja California peninsula, including the side facing the Gulf of California (aka Sea of Cortez) and the western coast of Mexico that borders the Gulf of California could be interesting places to look.

[Botany]

6. Certain tribes such as the Shawnee have an oral history about their ancestors crossing the ....

….. Pacific and landing on the West Coast of N. & S. America. We have Homo sapiens footprints
from the American southwest from 20 to 30,000 years ago that predate the 15,000 years ago of
the breakout along the coast of Alaska or down through central Alaska in breaks of the ice sheets.
The finding of human “stuff” on the east coast is just one more piece of information about man’s
history and how the earth was populated.

[wnylib]

7. Do you have a source link for Shawnee stories of originating

from across the Pacific Ocean? They would not have used the word Pacific since that name is European based. So how would we know that their origin stories refer to the Pacific? They lived in the East in the 1600s near the Atlantic coast and were driven westward into parts of western PA, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia by other tribal nations and by European settlers. Over the years, they became split up and spread out to parts of the Midwest and the South.

It would be quite rare for a people living so far away from the Pacific Ocean to carry a unified cultural identity and stories of Pacific origins for over 20,000 years. The original people in the Americas did not have the languages and tribal identities that they evolved into over the centuries and millennia since the first humans arrived in the Americas.

There is an origin story among the Shawnee of coming from an island composed of the back of a turtle surrounded by water. But the story does not say where the island was located. It's an origin concept that exists among other Native Americans and the source of the term Turtle Island for America. That refers to some shared images in creation stories among various Native cultures. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) also call America Turtle Island, based on religious stories of the creation of the world. But the Shawnee are an Algonquin culture, not Haudenosaunee.

Here is the Shawnee story about origins on an island.


https://indigenouspeoplenet.wordpress.com/2022/08/19/mythologies-of-the-shawnee/#:~:text=The%20Shawnee%20creation%20myth%20is,and%20traveled%20to%20this%20one.

[Botany]

8. Sorry I heard about that story from a Shawnee who was giving a talk to group interested in ecological....

… restoration.

Now where did the people living by the Chesapeake come from? Btw Native American People
are not thrilled about giving up samples of earlier people for DNA analysis.

[wnylib]

9. I have some Native ancestry through my paternal grandmother

so I am aware that many Native people are resistant to DNA testing, not only of remains found by archaeologists, but also of DNA testing of living Native people.

Objections to DNA testing are based on both religious views of not disturbing ancestors and on the abuses of studies of Native people by racist pseudoscientists in the past.

But not all Native people have such strong objections to DNA testing. My grandmother was descended from a past Seneca leader but we have no paper documentation of it. When I discussed that with Seneca people at a cultural museum on Seneca territory, they suggested that I do DNA testing to locate other descendants of that leader who might be able to help me with records, or at least to prove that descent through DNA. The Seneca Nation has a genealogy group and many Senecas have had their DNA tested in order to learn about non Native ancestry in their families. Quite a few enrolled tribal members have mixed ancestry. Mixed ancestry is also true of many other Native tribal nations, just like many African Americans also have some European or other ancestry.

As for where the people from the Chesapeake area came from, we can't know without DNA analysis of the remains that were found there. The ability to do a DNA analysis will depend on consent of Native people from the area per NAGPRA, if they can be located.

When I suggested in an earlier post that I favor travel by boat for the first people in the Americas, I was not suggesting that they sailed the open ocean in a seagoing vessel from China or Japan across the wide expanse of the Pacific. Or even that they island hopped across the open Pacific at its wider distances. I believe that people hugged the northern coasts between northeastern Asia and northwestern North America.

It takes time for glaciers to grow and spread over large areas of land. It's a process that does not happen overnight. So, while glaciers were growing and sea levels were gradually getting lower, more land was exposed between Alaska and northeastern Asia, reducing the distance to travel by boat between Asia and North America. That would have been happening even before the land was fully exposed to create the Beringian land bridge. Also the distance between islands in the Aleutian chain, which extends in a semi circle on the southern rim of the Bering Sea between Asia and North America, would have been smaller, making it possible for people to island hop the Aleutians from Asia to North America. Therefore, people could have entered North America before the glaciers spread enough to block access.

Any people who continued down the coast of North America would likely have done it by hugging the coastline where they could come ashore to build camps, repair or make new tools and boats, hunt land animals, etc.

I do not believe that any humans were traveling by boat across the whole open Pacific at its wider points 20,000 years ago. Even the expert Polynesian sailors were not doing that until several thousand years later than 20,000 years ago.

[Botany]

10. Thank you for your post

You have far more knowledge about the subject than I do. The neat think about real
science and anthropology is that new discoveries and data almost always leads to
new questions.

The stuff found around the Chesapeake is the same age as the footprints found in
what is now the American Southwest…. makes me wonder.

Btw when I saw clips of republicans trying to show up Dr. Fauci @ a recent congressional
hearing I wanted to scream. The man worked on Zika, Ebola, C-19, and helped to bring
about the first treatments to keep HIV+ people from developing AIDs and is far out of their
league as are the evolutionary biologists who traced the C-19 virus back to “the wet markets”
in Wuhan, China.

[wnylib]

11. I've been following news about the arrival of people in the Americas

since childhood. In college I minored in cultural anthropology.

Dr. James Adovasio, who excavated the Meadowcroft Rockshelter was mentioned in the OP's linked article. He was Director of the Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. Erie is my home town although I live in western NY now.

I was a volunteer one summer in the 1990s on a dig that his students were doing for fieldwork experience. The location was the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern PA which is part of the Allegheny Highlands Forest that extends into NY state so it was near enough for me to drive to easily.

There were no great discoveries made on that dig, but it was interesting for me because I got a chance to meet Dr. Adovasio and talk with some of his staff. They were the ones who first introduced me to the possibility of a water route along the northern coasts of Asia and North America.

Meadowcroft was one of the first sites to be a serious challenge to the Clovis First theory. Adovasio was very meticulous in his work so he was frustrated by all the challenges to the site's findings by scientists defending Clovis. He referred to them as the Clovis Mafia.

[PufPuf23]

12. Thirty years ago, worked as a contractor conducting an EIS on the Tongass National Forest of SE Alaska.

The project to development of a 190,000 acres planning area with much Inland Passage frontage. Development never occurred (which was my druthers).

Part of the EIS was an archeological assessment.

The landscape and vegetation of SE Alaska is relatively simple and young in terms of soil development because was under ice.

There are extreme tides in SE Alaska. During a low tide, everyone involved including some of the contractors running the floating camp walked the areas seldom exposed. There was a detailed plan of survey with the more qualified people looking at areas most probable to find something in the zone under water except for rare occasions. About 50 people were involved of all disciplines plus had two helicopters and three Boston Whalers.

There was a village found that was thought at the time (1994) to be the oldest site in SE Alaska.

This fits in with your ideas and also with the thoughts that early North Americans crossed a land bridge from Asia.

[wnylib]

13. Sounds like it was interesting work.

Last edited Sun Jun 23, 2024, 10:39 PM - Edit history (1)

The problem with the theory of crossing a land bridge past Alaska into North America on foot is that, by the time that the Beringia land bridge was fully formed where the Bering Straight exists now, there was no land access into the interior of North America because 2 miles thick Alaskan and Canadian glaciers completely blocked off a land route.

We know that people did live on that land bridge, called Beringua, for a couple thousand years and formed a genetic cluster of traits and traceable DNA mutations. The Clovis theory is that they stayed on the Beringia land bridge until part of the glaciers melted leaving an ice free corridor for people to travel inland into North America past Alaska.

But the dates for when glaciers opened up enough to pass into North America are only about 12,000 years ago and we have sites dated now at 20,000 to 23,000 years ago. So the first people in the Americas came long before the glaciers opened up a land route. The only possible way for that to happen is by boat. One possibility is what I posted earlier, that glacial formation gradually caused more land to be exposed so that new islands formed in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands got larger with less distance between them. Then people could island hop from Asia into North America, bypassing the land glaciers. Or, once enough land was exposed to form Beringia, people followed the southern shore of Beringia all the way to the Pacific coast of North America, bypassing the land glaciers by taking the sea route.

Or, it's possible that geologists have the timing of the Last Glacial Maximum wrong. It might have occurred later than they think, and therefore it was possible for people to take an open land route. Or the glacial melting might have occurred earlier than they think, leaving an open land route.

But, given the current estimated timing of maximum glaciation, and the fact that we know that people in other parts of Asia were using boats for short distances between land masses that long ago, I favor the water route entry. It matches the dates of glaciation and later melting and matches what we know about coastal people using boats that long ago.

It helps to picture what happened if you look at a map if the Bering region today and at a map of the region when Beringia existed.

https://images.app.goo.gl/aht8GPsitQ6BYhQF8


https://images.app.goo.gl/JABjfVxk6Xfat6PH8

[PufPuf23]

14. Sloppy to say land bridge as meant island/coastal hopping over a long period of time,

not trudging across land and ice.

Map at first link does not cover the site. Second map barely has the site location within the Inland Passage.

The survey had a detailed plan and was timed to one of the lowest tides of the year; what was found was 10-15 feet below the normal 1994 water line. Ocean level was much lower when humans lived there because there was much more ice to melt. Areas that had more potential for cultural sites had more detailed surveys and the more qualified surveyors. The project and Fed archeologists were jazzed. Found the name and number of the report of the initial assessment and two databases where report can be found just now on internet. The archeologists thought the site was the oldest known site in Southeast Alaska when found in 1994.

[wnylib]

15. ???

Who said that land bridge and island hopping were the same thing?

Prior to the full exposure of the land that we call Beringia, the gradual process of water levels becoming lower meant that some parts of what later became Beringia would be exposed before others due to the uneven ocean floor beneath the Bering Straight. Likewise, already existing islands like the Aleutian chain would have more of their perimeters exposed as dry land, making them larger with resulting less distance between them. That would make it possible for a marine adapted population to cross between the islands.

It's like the reverse of what we are seeing today with global warming and higher ocean levels. Oceanic islands are not disappearing all at once. It is happening gradually. The first areas of islands to be submerged by water are the lower, sandy shorelines that are vulnerable to erosion. Harder, rock based land at higher elevations remains above water. The result is that the island becomes smaller with more water distance between the island and other islands. At the same time, the other nearby islands experience the same decrease in size and even continental shorelines get eroded. All of this land loss creates greater distances between continents and islands offshore and between the islands themselves.

During the full exposure of the Beringian land mass, the cold Arctic Ocean water was confined to north of Beringia. People would have been able to follow the southern shore of Beringia to the Western coast of North America.

The Alaskan and Canadian glaciers were merged together into impenetrable miles thick layers of ice and snow. Nobody was traipsing over them until they melted enough to become passable, starting around 12,000 years ago.

And yet, we have dates of human presence in the Americas going back to 20,000 to 23,000 years ago. They couldn't have arrived by land over the glaciers. So either they arrived by boat, bypassing the glaciers, or the timeline of glaciation has to be altered.

[Warpy]

16. Itt's pretty well established that when the Siberian tribes crossed Beringia

other people were already here to meet them, leaving footprints here in NM and skeletal remains in eastern Brazil and we'll probably find more as time goes on.