This just in: People lived here before us
Never know what you’ll find in the backyard. Or under a Great Lake:
13,000-Year-Old Tools Used by Clovis People Found at Colorado Home
DENVER – Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a “chink” that just didn’t sound right.
They had stumbled on a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried about 13,000 years ago by the Clovis people – ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists.
But the landscapers dug up one important piece of the puzzle.
Biochemical analysis of protein residue revealed the tools were used to butcher camels, horses, sheep and bears, proving that the Clovis people ate more than just woolly mammoth meat for dinner.</em>
Ancient hunters’ clues found in lake
Structures were above water about 9,000 years ago
University of Michigan researchers have found the first archaeological evidence of ancient human hunting activity preserved under the Great Lakes.
Using detailed government data on lake floor topography, a research vessel and a remote mini-rover equipped with a camera, scientists found what they believe are hunting pits, camps and rock structures called caribou “drive lines’’ on the bottom of Lake Huron.
Drive lines, also called drive lanes, are walls built of rocks that hunters used to lure caribou into ambush. A peculiarity of the deer species is that it readily follows linear cues, even though the rock walls are short enough to step over.
The structures were found on an underwater ridge that – about 9,000 years ago – was a land bridge above water. The 10-mile-wide Alpena-Amberley ridge stretches more than 100 miles from near Point Clark, Ontario, to Presque Isle. </em>
As the kids say, awesome.
