USA TODAY: Discovery Puts Humans in South Carolina 50,000 years ago

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Artifacts found in a hillside along the Savannah River indicate that modern humans inhabited North America as long as 50,000 years ago, a discovery that challenges long-held theories on the migration of our ancient ancestors.

The find reported Wednesday by archaeologist Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina flies in the face of the conventional scientific view that homo sapiens — with the same bone structure and brain size as today's people — moved into North America within the past 12,000 years. Until then, a 23,000-year-long Ice Age was thought to have blocked travel across Alaska's Bering Strait.

"Fifty thousand years ago is mind-boggling. It challenges a lot of theories," Archaeology magazine's Eric Powell says. "All of our models of how humans migrated will have to be reconsidered if this holds up," he says.

Goodyear and his colleagues have been exploring the ancient flint quarry in Allendale County, S.C., since 1998, unearthing a hearth, flint blades and tool chips.

The age estimate of the deepest artifacts is based on measures of radioactive carbon traces found in oak, conifer, buckeye and other plants buried alongside them.

The report, awaiting publication and peer review in a scientific journal, is certain to be controversial among archaeologists because it means that the first people raced across the globe after migrating from Africa 100,000 years ago.

North and South America had long been considered the last continents settled by humans, but the find suggests Asia was just a rest stop for humanity early on. Goodyear says the tools resemble those found in early human sites in Asia from about the same period.

Recent evidence from sites in Chile and Oklahoma have suggested that modern humans inhabited the Americas as far back as 30,000 years ago. They are thought to have colonized Australia only 60,000 years ago and Europe about 45,000 years ago.

"Man is a traveler, an explorer," Goodyear says. "In retrospect, it's almost absurd to insist that people could never get into North America before the last Ice Age."

"The question is not the validity of the dates but what is being dated," says archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Skeptics will likely argue that the simple flint blades are natural in origin.

"At present, I don't think these new dates prove anything. It signals to us to keep the window of opportunity and possibility cautiously open," Dillehay says.

If proved, the dates still leave open the question of how people arrived in North America. A number of routes are possible:

• A land bridge between Siberia and Alaska may have existed before the last Ice Age.

• Boats may have brought coastal fishermen island-hopping across the Bering Strait.

• Early Australians may have kept going east.

The discovery will likely cause archaeologists to dig deeper at flint sites across the continent, Goodyear says. "It may be we haven't found these before because we haven't been looking."

Okay, I am officially confused, are you telling me that there were people here in North America before Christopher Columbus got here?

Does anyone else get tired of these stupid "this challenges all our previous models" nonsense. Anyone in this field with half a brain knows that just about 1 in 5 new discoveries will thrown everything off. Big deal!

As for how they arrived, I personally like the third option: "Early Australians may have kept going east."

My wife says that they came to America for the promise of equality and a better life. I'm so happy for them . . . but then, why South Carolina?