Humans in the Americas 50,000 years ago?

That is one of the theories to be explored tomorrow night on Time Team America. Check your local PBS listings.

THE TOPPER SITE

In 1998, archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, while excavating a prehistoric site on the Savannah river in Allendale County, SC, discovered stone implements far deeper in the ground than they had ever encountered before. Subsequent excavations and studies have revealed that ancient humans were present 16,000 or more years ago, some two to three thousand years earlier than previously allowed by textbooks. Known as the Topper Site, it appears to be one of several sites in the eastern U.S. producing evidence that humans were living in the western hemisphere during the last Ice Age.

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On July 15th, 2009, Time Team America visits one of the most controversial sites in North America: the Topper site, which is believed by its excavator to contain a 20,000-50,000 year old preclovis site.

Read the review

Waters, Michael R., Steven L. Forman, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., and John Foss 2009 Geoarchaeological Investigations at the Topper and Big Pine Sites, Allendale County, Central Savannah River, South Carolina. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(7):1300-1311. As far as I'm aware, this is the only peer-reviewed paper on Topper published to date. It details the stratigraphy and presents a suite of AMS and thermoluminescence dates for it; but concludes that the human origin of the "smashed core and microliths" preclovis occupation has not been proven.

• Time Team America: Topper site, at PBS where you can watch the video in its entirety after July 15,2009
• Topper: The Allendale Expedition, official homepage of the Topper site
• David Anderson and Michael Faught's map "Paleoindian Database of the Americas"
• Why 50,000 is a Crazy Date for Topper, which explains the hurdles the Topper site needs to scale to be accepted.
• Clovis Culture, a description of the sites and living style
• PreClovis Culture, the evidence and (generally) accepted sites
• Clovis, Black Mats, and Extraterrestrials, the theory about a cometary explosion over the Canadian ice sheet

Populating America: Four Theories

• Clovis and the Ice Free Corridor
• Preclovis and the Pacific Coast Migration
• Solutrean Precursors to Clovis
• Trans-Pacific Contacts

http://archaeology.about.com/od/currentevents/ss/time_team_america_3.htm

http://www.pbs.org/opb/timeteam/

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New Discoveries at Monte Verde Push Back Human Arrival Date

Ancient Seaweed Tells of Earliest Americans

Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press


Monte Verde

May 8, 2008 -- Remains of meals that included seaweed are helping confirm the date of a settlement in southern Chile that may offer the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas.
Researchers date the seaweed found at Monte Verde to more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than the well-studied Clovis culture.

And the report comes just a month after other scientists announced they had found coprolites
fossilized human feces -- dating to about 14,000 years ago in a cave in Oregon.

Taken together, the finds move back evidence of people in the Americas by a millennium or more, with settlements in northern and southern coastal areas.

The prevailing theory has been that people followed herds of migrating animals across an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and then moved southward along the West coast. Proof has been hard to come by, however. The sea was about 200 feet lower at the time and as it rose it would have inundated the remains of coastal settlements.

Full Article Here:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/05/08/seaweed-monte-verde.html

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_migration_to_the_New_World#Land_bridge_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_migration_to_the_New_World#Clovis_culture