The United States is under 250 years old, but some of its maximum archaeological sites are older than Vikings sailors, the Roman empire and the pyramids.
Many help tell the story of how the first humans came to North America. It’s still a mystery exactly how and when people arrived, though it’s widely believed they crossed the Bering Strait at least 15,000 years ago.
“As we get further back in time, as we get populations that are smaller and smaller, finding these places and interpreting them becomes increasingly difficult,” archaeologist Kenneth Feder told Business Insider. He’s the author of “Ancient America: Fifty Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself.”
Some sites, like White Sands and Cooper’s Ferry, have skeptics about the accuracy of their age. Still, they contribute to our understanding of some of the earliest Americans.
Others are more recent and highlight the different cultures that were spreading around the country, with complex buildings and illuminating pictographs.
Many of these places are open to the public, so you can see the US’ ancient history for yourself.
Prehistoric camels, mammoths, and giant sloths once roamed what’s now New Mexico, when it was greener and damper.
As the climate warmed around 11,000 years ago, the water of Lake Otero receded, revealing footprints of humans who lived among these extinct animals. Some even seemed to be following a sloth, offering a rare glimpse into ancient hunters’ behavior.
Recent research puts some of these fossilized footprints at between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. If the dates are accurate, the prints would predate other archaeological sites in the US, raising intriguing questions about who these people were and how they arrived in the Southwestern state.
“Where are they coming from?” Feder said. “They’re not parachute dropping in New Mexico. They must have come from somewhere else, which means there are even older sites.” Archaeologists simply haven’t found them yet.
While visitors can soak in the sight of the eponymous white sands, the footprints are currently off-limits.
In the 1970s, archaeologist James M. Adovasio sparked a controversy when he and his colleagues suggested stone tools and other artifacts found in southwestern Pennsylvania belonged to humans who had lived in the area 16,000 years ago.
For decades, scientists had been finding evidence of human habitation that all seemed to be around 12,000 to 13,000 years old, belonging to the Clovis culture. They were long believed to have been the first to cross the Bering land bridge. Humans who arrived in North America before this group are often referred to as pre-Clovis.
At the time, skeptics said that the radiocarbon dating evidence was flawed, AP News reported in 2016. In the years since, more sites that appear older than 13,000 years have been found across the US.
Feder said that Advasio meticulously registered the site, but there is still no transparent consensus on the age of the oldest artifacts. However, he said: “This site is surely a vital, vital and vital site. ” This helped archaeologists realize that humans began arriving in the continent against the people of Clovis.
A site that has added intriguing evidence to the prior to the cloud is in the west of Idaho. Humans living there have stone equipment and carbonized bones in a house between 14,000 and 16,000 years, according to the radiocarbon dating. Other researchers approached the dates 11,500 years ago.
Some scientists that humans had possibly traveled along the west coast at that time, when glacial capital letters covered Alaska and Canada. “People who use boats, who use canoes can also jump through this coast and meet in North America long before these glacial bodies are cut,” Feder said.
Cooper’s ferry is in the classic nose of the Perce nose, which the land administration office has in public property.
In the early 1980s, Navy Seal’s old page of the page alerted the paleantologists and archaeologists of an abyss nicknamed “Booger Hole” on the Aucilla River. There, Mom and mastodonic bones and stone tools.
“The stone machinery and on the site show that at 14,550 years, other people knew how to locate the game, the new water and the device to make machinery,” said Michael Waters, one of the researchers, in a press release in 2016 “. ” These other people were well suitable for this environment. “
Scientists examine coprolitos or fossilized peanut, to be informed more about long and fast animals diets. Mineralized tea can also reveal much more. In 2020, archaeologist Dennis Jenkins published an article on the coprolitos of an Oregon cave that is over 14,000 years old.
Radiocarbon dating has given fossil lines, and genetic tests reported that they belonged to man. A deeper investigation of the Coprolitos added more evidence that an organization on the west coast 1,000 years before the arrival of the people of Clovis.
Located in the center of Oregon-South, the caves seem to be a piece of the puzzle that indicates how humans have the continent thousands of years ago.
The Federal Land Management Office owns the land where the caves are located, and are signed at the beginning of historical places.
Although Alaska can have a richness of archaeological evidence of the first Americans, it is also a difficult position to dig. “His excavation season is very close and expensive,” Feder said. Some require a helicopter to achieve, for example.
In 1929, James Ridgley, 1929, 1929, discovered gigantic bones with striated projectile problems near Clovis, in New Mexico. The other Clovis people who made these teams were named for this site.
The researchers who examine the site began to realize that the artifacts discovered on the site belonged to other cultures. Clovis’s problems are larger than Folsom flutes, which were first discovered in another archaeological site of New Mexico.
For decades after Whiteman’s discovery, the idea of the mavens that the other people of Clovis were the first to cross the Bering d’Aring land bridge about 13,000 years ago. It is believed that the estimates of the arrival of humans are now at least 15,000 years ago.
One of the reasons why the dates of the human profession in North America are so debatable is that very few old remains have been found. Among the oldest, there is a Sun river boy up, or Xaasaa Na ‘, in the middle of Alaska.
Based on the child’s genetic information, the researchers learned that he was connected to fashion asleans, but not directly. His non -unusual ancestors began to remarry genetically 25,000 years before dividing into two teams after a few thousand years: the ancient Berignians and the ancestors of the fashionable Americans.
You can see the world heritage site through yourself throughout the year.
Although it rises, the multicolored walls of the Horseshoe canyon have attracted visitors for a long time. Some of its artifacts return between 9,000 and 7,000 a. C. , but its pictograms are more recent. Some tests date from safe sections of around 2,000 to 900 years.
It is a complicated walk to succeed in pictograms (and the NPS warns that it can be dangerously hot in summer) but it is seeing in person, Feder said. “These are artistic geniuses,” he said about artists.
More than 900 years ago, the other town of Puebloan built the White House, which bears the name of the shadow of their clay. Its upper floors are sitting in a sandstone cliff, with a transparent fall of the windows.
A white walk is the one that is open to the public without a Navajo or NPS Ranger guide.
With the help of dendrocronology or trees dating, archaeologists learned when the ancestral people built some of those structures and that emigrated outside the doors of the region through the years 1300.
At that time, he is booming with hunters, farmers and artisans. “It’s an agricultural civilization,” Feder said. “It is a position where raw fabrics arrive thousands kilometers away. ” The researchers also discovered articular wells, potentially discovered in human sacrifices.
The population built posts of posts, which an archaeologist called “Woodhenges”, as a type of calendar. In the solstices, the sun rises or lies aligned with other mounds.
Although Cahokia is open to the public, the portions are recently closed for renovations.
Presented in a limestone cliff in Camp Verde, Arizona, this is an apartment, not a castle, and is not connected to Sovereign Aztec Montezuma.
The other people of Sinagua have designed the construction of five stories and 20 rooms around 1100. It is curved to adhere to the herbal line of the cliff, which would have been more complicated than simply making a correct construction, Feder said.
The population was also practical, discovering irrigation systems and structure techniques, such as thick walls and shaded spots, to help them in the warm and dry climate.
Hop