Research Confirms Eastern Wyoming Paleoindian Site as Americas’ Oldest Mine

https://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2022/05/research-confirms-eastern-wyoming-paleoindian-site-as-americas-oldest-mine.html

by Petiver • 4 years ago

43 8 4 years ago

ncmncm2• 4 years ago

It has been quite a few years since serious anthropologists or archaeologists considered Clovis the first North American culture. The Texan sites that excavated hundreds of thousands of pre-Clovis artifacts from strata thousands of years before Clovis have been well-known for decades.

It looks like this site fell out of use for a long time immediately after the Younger Dryas bolide strike of BCE 10,816 that wiped out the Clovis culture along with 30+ genera of large mammals, including horses, camels, giant sloths, dire wolves, and mammoths, and deposited a layer of sharply platinum-enriched dust and soot.

ch4s33• 4 years ago

My understanding was that the Younger Dryas strike as the cause of megafauna extinction was still somewhat TBD. Has new evidence come to light in the last few years? Papers?

AlotOfReading2• 4 years ago

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is not quite confirmed, but is probably going to be generally accepted within the next few years. The most recent review I'm aware of is Sweatman's 2021 [1] article arguing that we're already there. He makes a very relevant callout in the paper as well:

    The proposal is that this impact triggered the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling and contributed to the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and human cultural changes. Equally, it should be clear that Firestone et al. (2007) are not claiming that the impact event itself wiped out many genera of megafauna or an entire human culture in an instant.

Of course, it's pretty obvious that the late quaternary extinction events weren't solely related to any particular impact event, if for no other reason than that many of the extinctions pre-date the impact and we can see the decline in North American megafaunal populations long before it.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103677

Research Confirms Eastern Wyoming Paleoindian Site as Americas’ Oldest Mine

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