Late Pleistocene Archaeology and Ecology in the Far Northeast. Partially based on a symposium held in 2009 at the Quebec Archaeological Association Meeting. Peopling of the Americas Publications. Edited by Claude Chapdelaine; Foreword by, Christopher Ellis. College Station (Texas): Texas A&M University Press. $68.00. xvi + 247 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-1-60344-790-4 (hc); 978-1-60344-805-5 (eb). 2012.

2014 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Donald R. Prothero
Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 362 (6419) ◽  
pp. eaav2621 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar ◽  
Lasse Vinner ◽  
Peter de Barros Damgaard ◽  
Constanza de la Fuente ◽  
Jeffrey Chan ◽  
...  

Studies of the peopling of the Americas have focused on the timing and number of initial migrations. Less attention has been paid to the subsequent spread of people within the Americas. We sequenced 15 ancient human genomes spanning from Alaska to Patagonia; six are ≥10,000 years old (up to ~18× coverage). All are most closely related to Native Americans, including those from an Ancient Beringian individual and two morphologically distinct “Paleoamericans.” We found evidence of rapid dispersal and early diversification that included previously unknown groups as people moved south. This resulted in multiple independent, geographically uneven migrations, including one that provides clues of a Late Pleistocene Australasian genetic signal, as well as a later Mesoamerican-related expansion. These led to complex and dynamic population histories from North to South America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (14) ◽  
pp. 4263-4267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Waters ◽  
Thomas W. Stafford ◽  
Brian Kooyman ◽  
L. V. Hills

The only certain evidence for prehistoric human hunting of horse and camel in North America occurs at the Wally’s Beach site, Canada. Here, the butchered remains of seven horses and one camel are associated with 29 nondiagnostic lithic artifacts. Twenty-seven new radiocarbon ages on the bones of these animals revise the age of these kill and butchering localities to 13,300 calibrated y B.P. The tight chronological clustering of the eight kill localities at Wally’s Beach indicates these animals were killed over a short period. Human hunting of horse and camel in Canada, coupled with mammoth, mastodon, sloth, and gomphothere hunting documented at other sites from 14,800–12,700 calibrated y B.P., show that 6 of the 36 genera of megafauna that went extinct by approximately 12,700 calibrated y B.P. were hunted by humans. This study shows the importance of accurate geochronology, without which significant discoveries will go unrecognized and the empirical data used to build models explaining the peopling of the Americas and Pleistocene extinctions will be in error.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. e1600375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessi J. Halligan ◽  
Michael R. Waters ◽  
Angelina Perrotti ◽  
Ivy J. Owens ◽  
Joshua M. Feinberg ◽  
...  

Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged.Sporormiellaand other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. eaat4505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Waters ◽  
Joshua L. Keene ◽  
Steven L. Forman ◽  
Elton R. Prewitt ◽  
David L. Carlson ◽  
...  

Lanceolate projectile points of the Clovis complex and stemmed projectile points of the Western Stemmed Tradition first appeared in North America by ~13 thousand years (ka) ago. The origin, age, and chronological superposition of these stemmed and lanceolate traditions are unclear. At the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, below Folsom and Clovis horizons, we find stemmed projectile points dating from ~13.5 to ~15.5 ka ago, with a triangular lanceolate point form appearing ~14 ka ago. The sequential relationship of stemmed projectile points followed by lanceolate forms suggests that lanceolate points are derived from stemmed forms or that they originated from two separate migrations into the Americas.


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