Friday, July 29, 2016

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH—A prehistoric campsite in Utah’s West Desert has yielded a 12,300-year-old hearth surrounded by more than 60 artifacts, including a large spear point, stone flakes, the bones of ducks and geese, and the earliest-known collection of tobacco seeds. “It’s a new world plant, not a plant from the other side of the world, so obviously this raises a lot of questions,” archaeologist Daron Duke of Far Western Anthropological Research Group said in a Western Digs report. “Also of significance is that these people were carrying their big-game tool kits, as evidenced by the big point found right next to the hearth,” added geoarchaeologist Craig Young. He thinks the spear point resembles those found nearby at a mammoth-hunting site of similar antiquity. At the time, the region would have been ten to 15 degrees cooler, with rivers, lakes, and marshy wetlands. “Toward the end of this period, for people who had the run of North America, things were drying up, and this could have been one of the last places they decided to make use of,” Duke said. To read about the earliest humans in the New World, go to "America, in the Beginning."