Site in Florida Confirms Pre-Clovis Peopling of the Americas 14,550 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating of a prehistoric archeological site in Florida suggests that 14,550 years ago, hunter-gatherers, possibly accompanied by dogs, butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a small pond. The findings, based on a four-year study of the Page-Ladson archaeological site in the Aucilla River, about 45 minutes from Tallahassee, Florida, provide a rare glimpse of the earliest human occupation in the southeastern United States, and offer clues to the timing of the disappearance of large animals like the mastodon and camel that roamed the American Southeast during the Late Pleistocene.


Additionally, the artifacts at Page-Ladson highlight that much of the earliest record of human habitation of the American Southeast lies submerged and buried in unique depositional settings like those found along the Aucilla River, which passes through Florida on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This record can only be accessed through underwater investigation, which, if undertaken with precision and care, should reveal a rich and abundant pre-Clovis record for the American Southeast, the authors say.


Despite genetic evidence that people were traveling to the Americas before Clovis, the archaeological record of human habitation in the region between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago is sparse. However, the long-held belief that Clovis represented the first people to enter the Americas is being overturned by new evidence from early sites. The Page-Ladson site is one of just a handful of archaeological gold-mines in the Americas harboring evidence of a pre-Clovis occupation – evidence that has been challenged since researchers discovered the site in the 1980s.


So Jessi Halligan, Michael Waters and a team of experts returned to Page-Ladson in 2012 to reevaluate the archaeological evidence that lay undisturbed in the river bed. Using the latest radiocarbon dating techniques, the researchers confirmed the ages of the stone artifacts and mastodon remains to about 14,550 years ago. The artifacts tell the story of what was likely the butchering or scavenging of a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. Evidence from Page-Ladson, along with that from other sites like Monte Verde in Chile, shows that people were living in both hemispheres of the Americas at least 14,550 years ago and confirms genetic predictions for the timing of the arrival of humans into the Americas. Moreover, microscopic tracking of Sporormiella (a fungus often found on animal dung) in sediments at the site, along with other evidence from Page-Ladson sediment samples, indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain in North America likely coexisted with and used large animals for at least 2,000 years before these animals became extinct around 12,600 years ago.

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2016/article/prehistoric-site-in-florida-confirms-pre-clovis-peopling-of-the-americas

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/e1600375







Now here's an interesting side story to this


Vero man


Vero man refers to a set of fossilized human bones found near Vero (now Vero Beach), Florida, USA in 1915 and 1916. The human bones were found in association with those of Pleistocene animals. The question of whether humans were present in Florida (or anywhere in the Americas) during the Pleistocene was controversial at the time, and most archaeologists did not accept that the Vero fossils were that old. Recent studies show that the Vero human bones are from the Pleistocene, and are the largest collection of human remains from the Pleistocene found in North America.


snip


The human bones excavated by Sellards were passed around various institutions for study. By the time carbon-14 dating of fossils became possible, some 35 years after the discovery of Vero man, some of the bones had been lost, and others had been rendered unusable for such testing due to the way they had been preserved with chemicals.[4]............ all of this was done at and by the Smithsonian..


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vero_man


I think this find lend credence to European continent migration, even though small, to the new world. But the major migration came from the Siberian/Alaskan corridor.