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Darrin Lowery discovered a collection of tools in Maryland that may date back 22,000 years.
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That would mean that people first came to North America thousands of years before we thought.
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Most experts believe that humans first arrived in North America between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago.
North and South America were the last inhabited continents settled by modern humans thousands of years ago, but when and how they reached the Americas is still a mystery.
“We don’t know who these first people were,” Todd Braje, executive director of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, told Business Insider. We don’t know “where they came from, when they came, the technologies they had available,” he said.
For many years, archaeologists thought that the first people to set foot in the Americas were around 13,000 years ago. But recently, new findings have challenged that theory, pushing the timeline back even further.
Now, a series of recent discoveries on Parsons Island, Maryland, may start the clock back. And it raises some difficult questions about early human migration across North America.
Outside the mainstream
Darrin Lowery has been looking for artifacts on the Maryland islands around the Chesapeake Bay since he was 9 years old. More than 40 years later, he has amassed a large collection of tools that he believes were used by some of the earliest Americans.
He found nearly 300 tools on Parsons Island and says they are around 22,000 years old. That’s thousands of years before many scientists think humans first went to North America.
If Lowery’s hypothesis is correct, it would significantly change our ideas about how and when people started arriving in this part of the world.
However, Lowery, who works primarily as an independent geologist, has yet to publish his latest work in a peer-reviewed journal, leaving other experts skeptical of a theory that is already somewhat outside the mainstream.
Lowery doesn’t mind the criticism, though. “If I’m wrong, I’m fine with that,” he told Business Insider. “Prove me wrong.”
When did the first modern people reach North America?
Around 13,000 years ago, something remarkable was happening across northern North America: The glaciers that had covered part of the continent for thousands of years were melting.
The archaeologists thought that people would have to wait until those glaciers melted to migrate across this region. Otherwise, the journey through Canada as it is now would be too dangerous, with little food available along the way.
So, for most of the 20th century, the theory was that the first Americans came from Asia about 13,000 years ago, crossing the now-underwater Bering land bridge that connected present-day Siberia and Alaska. Then those people and their ancestors made their way across areas of the Americas with fewer glaciers.
But by the second half of the 20th century, older sites were turning up, like the 14,500-year-old site in Chile, Monte Verde. If people were that far south at the time, it would mean that people had to travel from North America to South America long before 13,000 years ago.
“It really changed everything about what we understood about when and how people came to America,” Braje said of the Chilean site. One alternative theory is that people followed the less glaciated Pacific Coast and started moving east from there.
Although individual sites are often the subject of debate, the widely accepted range of the first arrival of humans in the Americas is now between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, Braje said.
But Lowery said his artifacts are even older.
Artifacts dating 22,000 years old
During 93 visits to Parsons Island, Lowery and other volunteers found a mixture of chipped rock flakes, hammerstone, and knives.
Due to erosion, most of the artefacts have fallen off the embankment they once held.
However, nine were still stuck in the bank, three of which were dated to around 22,000 years ago.
Ancient artefacts like this are hard to come by and often a point of contention around these sites questioning our understanding and timeline of ancient human history.
For example, most dating methods require organic material and will not work on stone tools. Instead, scientists test charcoal, pollen, and other material found near stone artifacts.
However, if a tool moves from its original position – such as if it falls off the opposite embankment – it is difficult to retrieve it reliably.
That’s why only a handful of Lowery’s artifacts could be tested.
Although Lowery does not want to publish a paper through peer review – a process known as “tiquated” – he said he did his due diligence to date the artifacts.
He used various methods to date the surviving artifacts and sent samples to independent laboratories for verification.
Using radiocarbon dating which measured the amount of carbon in charcoal flakes, an independent laboratory estimated the ages of the artefacts to be between 20,563 and 22,656 years old.
If these artifacts are as old as the laboratory analysis suggests, then Lowery’s discovery could rewrite our understanding of ancient American human history.
The trip from Alaska to Maryland
About 21,000 years ago, almost all of Canada was covered by a glacier. So one of the biggest questions surrounding Lowery’s theory is how people could have made the journey from Alaska to Maryland 22,000 years ago when there was a vast icy landscape between them.
But Lowery said nearly 26,000 years ago, Beringian wolves traveled through a temporary corridor between ice sheets. People could use the same route, he said.
“I think this is largely a misconception that ice is a barrier,” Lowery said. “It’s a challenge, but people are pretty damn smart.”
Lowery admitted that this is just a “story,” but it’s one that some experts refuse to entertain. One archaeologist the Washington Post spoke to declined to comment on the non-peer-reviewed paper.
For Braje, Lowery’s research is recalling past debates where new discoveries pushed back the timeline of the first people who came to the Americas.
Braje didn’t reject Lowery’s ideas outright, but he thinks they need to go through the peer review process. “I think all these ideas are valid that we should be talking about,” he said, “but then we have to go to the scientific evidence.”
“To make big claims like this it takes a lot of work, a lot of evidence, a lot of sustained criticism, but that’s part of the scientific process,” Braje said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
