To confirm those results, more samples of material from Cooper’s Ferry were tested. Last year Davis’ team sent a sample of charcoal from a hearth for radiocarbon testing and was surprised that it was in the 14,000-year-old age range. Over the last decade of excavation, Davis and his team found evidence of heat-cracked rocks from ancient campfires, workspaces for making and repairing tools, butchering sites, and fragments of animal bone. Namely, Davis wanted to know if the tools he found in the 1990s were older than tools in the Clovis tradition. Radiocarbon dates of bone and charcoal that were buried in the same small pit suggested these tools were up to 13,300 years old.ĭavis returned about ten years later to lead a more extensive exploration of Cooper's Ferry because he still had some lingering questions. He found a cache of stone points, known as western stemmed points, that could have been fixed to the handle of a spear or another weapon or tool. The Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) indigenous people referred to this site as an ancient village called Nipéhe.Īrchaeologist Loren Davis, a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis and lead author of the Science report, first excavated at Cooper's Ferry in the 1997 as part of his PhD dissertation. Todd Braje, an archaeologist at San Diego State University who reviewed the Science paper, similarly said the site is further evidence that "the Clovis-first model is no longer viable." “Older and older and older”Īt the bottom of a canyon near a bend in the lower Salmon River, Cooper's Ferry is an idyllic spot with hot summers and cold winters. "Cooper's Ferry, to me, is a totally convincing pre-Clovis site," says Grayson, who was not involved in the new study. But even Grayson, who admits he has a relatively "hard-nosed" view, would now include Cooper's Ferry in his short list. Though dozens of sites claim to be what archaeologists call “pre-Clovis,” Donald Grayson, archaeologist and emeritus professor at the University of Washington, believes that to date only a handful are accurately dated, including Monte Verde in Chile (about 14,500 years old), the Friedkin and Gault sites in Texas (15,500 years and 16,000 years old, respectively), and the Paisley Caves site in Oregon (about 14,000 years old). That’s how the story went-until researchers started finding artifacts older than Clovis across the Americas. As part of the “Clovis-first” hypothesis, most researchers believed that the people who made these tools first entered North America on foot from Asia by crossing Beringia, the stretch of land that once connected Siberia and Alaska, and traveling down an ice-free corridor that opened up when massive ice sheets that once covered the interior of North America began to retreat roughly 14,000 years ago. Until a couple decades ago, Clovis stone tools, which are generally about 13,000 years old, were considered to be the first human technology in the Americas. Radiocarbon dates show that people were creating tools and butchering animals in Cooper’s Ferry between 15,000 and 16,000 years ago, making Cooper’s Ferry a rare and important addition to the handful of archaeological sites that are upending the traditional theory of the peopling of the Americas. One of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas has been discovered in western Idaho, according to a study published today in the journal Science.
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