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Darrin Lowery found a collection of tools in Maryland that may date back 22,000 years.
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This means humans first arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than we thought.
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Most experts believe humans first arrived in North America between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago.
North and South America were the last continents settled by modern humans thousands of years ago, but when and how they reached America remains a mystery.
“We don’t know who these first humans 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,” he added.
For many years, archaeologists thought that the first humans to set foot on the American continent were around 13,000 years ago. But new findings have recently challenged this theory and pushed the timeline back even further.
Now, a series of recent discoveries on Maryland’s Parsons Island may turn back the clock once again. And this raises some difficult questions about early human migration in North America.
outside the mainstream
Darrin Lowery has been searching for artifacts on the Maryland islands around the Chesapeake Bay since he was 9 years old. More than 40 years later she has assembled a large collection of tools she believes were used by some of the first Americans she.
He found about 300 tools on Parsons Island and says they are about 22,000 years old. This is thousands of years before many scientists think humans first traveled to North America.
If Lowery’s hypothesis is correct, it would significantly change our ideas about how and when humans began arriving in this part of the world.
But Lowery, who works primarily as an independent geologist, has not published his latest work in a peer-reviewed journal, causing other experts to be skeptical of a theory that is already somewhat outside the mainstream.
But Lowery doesn’t pay attention to the criticism. “If I’m wrong, that’s fine with me,” he told Business Insider. “Prove me wrong.”
When did the first modern humans reach North America?
About 13,000 years ago, something significant was happening in northern North America: The glaciers that had covered parts of the continent for thousands of years were melting.
Archaeologists thought that people had to wait for these glaciers to melt to migrate to this region. Otherwise, the journey through what is now Canada would have been very dangerous and little food would have been 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-submerged Bering land bridge that connected Siberia with modern-day Alaska. Later, these people and their ancestors moved into less glaciated regions of the Americas.
But in the second half of the 20th century, older sites began to emerge, such as a 14,500-year-old site at Monte Verde in Chile. If humans were this far south at the time, that meant humans must have traveled from North America to South America 13,000 years ago.
“This really changed everything we understand about when and how people came to the Americas,” Braje said of the Chilean site. An alternative theory is that people followed the less icy Pacific Coast and then began moving eastward.
Although individual sites are often the subject of debate, the commonly accepted range for when humans first arrived in the Americas is now 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, Braje said.
But Lowery said his works are even older.
Dating 22,000-year-old artifacts
During their 93 visits to Parsons Island, Lowery and other volunteers found a mixture of broken rocks, a stone for hammering, and knives.
Due to erosion, many of the artifacts fell outside the embankment that once held them.
But nine were still trapped in the bank, three of which were dated to around 22,000 years ago.
Dating ancient artefacts like this is a difficult task and is often the source of contention around these sites, challenging our understanding and timeline of ancient human history.
For example, most dating methods require organic material and do not work on stone tools. Instead, scientists are testing charcoal, pollen and other substances found near stone artifacts.
However, if a tool slips from its original position (e.g. falls from the set that held it) it is difficult to date it reliably.
That’s why only a handful of Lowery’s works were tested.
While Lowery did not want to publish a paper through peer review, a process he called “outdated,” he said he did his due diligence in dating the works.
He used different methods to date the artifacts still in place and also sent samples to independent laboratories for verification.
Using radiocarbon dating, which measures the amount of carbon in coal flakes, an independent laboratory estimated the age of the artifacts to be between 20,563 and 22,656 years old.
If these artifacts are as old as laboratory analysis suggests, Lowery’s discovery could rewrite our understanding of ancient American human history.
Journey from Alaska to Maryland
About 21,000 years ago, almost all of Canada was covered by glaciers. So one of the big questions in Lowery’s theory is how humans were able to make the journey from Alaska to Maryland 22,000 years ago, with a vast, icy landscape in between.
But about 26,000 years ago, Beringian wolves moved through a temporary corridor between ice sheets, Lowery said. He said people may have used the same route.
“I think this is largely a misconception that ice is an obstacle,” Lowery said. “It’s a challenge, but people are pretty smart.”
Lowery acknowledged that this was exactly what he called “the story,” but it’s something some experts refuse to entertain. An archaeologist spoken to by the Washington Post declined to comment on the non-peer-reviewed article.
According to Braje, Lowery’s research is reminiscent of past controversies in which new discoveries pushed back the timeline of the first arrival of Americans.
Braje didn’t directly reject Lowery’s ideas, but he thinks they should go through the peer review process. “I think all of these ideas are valid ideas that we need to talk about,” he said, “but then we need to go to the scientific evidence.”
“Making big claims like this takes a lot of study, a lot of evidence, and a lot of sustained criticism, but that’s part of the scientific process,” Braje said.
Read the original article on Business Insider