Move over Clovis! Oregon may have been home to earliest humans in America

The Paisley Five Mile Point Caves, a network of caves in Oregon, may be the oldest site of human habitation in North America.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The find suggests that humans first reached the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age, a thousand years before the human settlements in New Mexico, the Clovis sites.

Help provide kids with the quality learning tools they need.

Following the discovery, the U.S. National Park Service added the cave complex to its list of archaeological and historical sites.

Dennis Jenkins, the director of the University of Oregon Archeology Field School, said that researchers have only recently become convinced that humans lived in the Paisley caves before they lived in the Clovis site.

Currently, the "Clovis First" hypothesis-which looks at the distinctive material remains of the tools around the United States-states that the first humans came about 13,300 years ago.

Jenkins and his team used radiocarbon dating on more than 200 samples of human waste from the Paisley caves, and found that they were deposited about 14,300 years ago.

The test findings provide "significant new information regarding the timing and spread of the first settlers in the Americas," Jenkins said.

Besides the biological samples, Jenkins and his team found stones that were used to grind up plant materials, woven plant fibers, stemmed projectile points and modified animal bones. All signs of early human habitation.

"The people living there 14,300 years ago were gathering and consuming aromatic roots, for which they would have needed special knowledge that would have developed over time," the press release announcing the site's placement on the National Register of Historic Places said.

The Paisley caves are located in rural south-central Oregon, now surrounded by sagebrush and sparsely populated. But scientists think the area was once a grassy plain that contained a lake and a population of camel, bison and waterfowl.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'