A7
THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, AuguST 31, 2019
North America’s oldest human artifacts found in Idaho
Columbia River
is key to a theory
By ERIN ROSS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Ancient human artifacts
found in a remote corner of
northwestern Idaho could
deliver a major blow to a
long-held theory that North
America’s first humans
arrived by crossing a land
bridge connected to Asia
before moving south through
the center of the continent.
The artifacts have been
dated to as far back as
16,500 years ago, making
them the oldest radiocarbon
dated evidence of humans in
North America, according to
research published Thursday
in the journal Science.
The artifacts are part of
a trove discovered where
Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, now
stands. They are a thou-
sand years older than what
has previously been con-
sidered North America’s
most ancient known human
remains. Together with doz-
ens of other archaeologi-
cal sites stretched across the
continent, it helps decipher
the story of when, and how,
humans first arrived.
“The traditional model
is that people came into the
New World from northeast
Asia and walked across the
Bering land bridge, before
coming down the middle of
the continent in an ice-free
corridor,” said Loren Davis,
an archaeologist at Oregon
State University and the lead
author on the study.
Those people suppos-
edly brought the technology
to make Clovis-type blades
and spear points with them,
and then spread their shared
culture across the continent.
That’s the model taught in
most history books.
The site at Cooper’s Ferry
doesn’t fit with this model.
For one, the ice-free cor-
ridor probably didn’t exist
when humans first arrived
at Cooper’s Ferry — scien-
tists think it didn’t open up
until about 15,000 years ago,
which means these early
people had to find a differ-
ent route south. Other early
sites challenged this theory,
but none were this old, and
Photos by Loren Davis/Oregon State University
Cooper’s Ferry sits on the Salmon River in Idaho, near where it meets the Snake River. People occupied the area for thousands of years.
Archaeologists work to excavate ancient human artifacts at
Cooper’s Ferry in western Idaho.
the oldest were dated with a
method considered less pre-
cise than radiocarbon dating.
“This is another domino
in the collapse of the Clo-
vis-first idea and the idea
that people walked down
an ice-free corridor some
13,500 years ago,” says
Todd Braje, an archaeologist
at San Diego State Univer-
sity, who was not involved
in the study.
“What’s really interest-
ing about Cooper’s Ferry
is that it takes things a lit-
tle further,” Braje says, “It
offers some potential ave-
nues for figuring out these
big questions.”
Alternative theory
Braje supports an alterna-
tive theory to the ice-free cor-
ridor: one where instead of
traveling to the New World
by land, ancient Americans
came by sea. They traveled
from Asia to North Amer-
ica by island-hopping and
hugged the shore, follow-
ing a coastal “kelp high-
way” full of sheltered bays
and rich with food. The idea
was once controversial, but
in recent years it’s gained
support.
Just like the ice-free cor-
ridor model is supported
by a shared technology and
shared culture found across
a region, the kelp highway
hypothesis also has a unit-
ing technology: stemmed
points. These are blades,
spear points knives, and cut-
ting tools all manufactured
the same way, and are one
of the oldest types of pro-
jectiles in the world. While
stemmed points are plenti-
ful along the coast of Asia,
there were very few found
at the older sites in North
America, and crucially, even
fewer found along the coast.
Of course, if Braje’s kelp
highway theory was true,
there would be very few
archaeological sites along
the West Coast of North
America: sea levels have
risen dramatically since the
Ice Age, so any human set-
tlements would have flooded
long ago.
That’s where Cooper’s
Ferry comes in.
Oregon State’s Davis first
began excavating the site in
the 1990s. His team uncov-
ered stemmed points and
dated them to over 13,000
years ago. At the time, there
were no other examples of
that technology from that
time in history in North
America, “we sort of sat in
limbo for a time as people
argued about what it might
mean,” Davis said.
They resumed excavation
in 2009. And in 2017, Davis
and his team once again
started finding stemmed
points.
“The
radiocar-
bon dates we were getting
started to tell the same story.
And then, it started to show
they were even older than
we realized. That was super
surprising.”
The stemmed points were
extremely similar to a type
found in Hokkaido, Japan,
also dated to around 16,000
years old.
Combined, Davis said
this supports the hypothe-
sis that the first Americans
didn’t arrive by land, but by
boats.
Braje agreed, “When you
look at the illustration Davis
had in there, of stemmed
points from Japan, and the
kind he was finding at Coo-
per’s Ferry, it’s really strik-
ing and very exciting.”
Though it isn’t definitive, he
says, it offers new avenues
of study.
Follow the Columbia
Although the site at Coo-
per’s Ferry is inland and far
from the coast, it sits at the
conjunction of two major
rivers that serve as tribu-
taries to the Columbia. “If
you’re traveling south along
the West Coast, the Colum-
bia River is pretty much
the first left you can take,”
Davis said.
It would be easy enough
to then follow the river,
rich with fish, to the conflu-
ence of two of its tributaries,
the Snake and Salmon Riv-
ers, and the spot along their
banks where Cooper’s Ferry
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Magnitude 6.3 earthquake
rumbles off Oregon Coast
Associated Press
COOS BAY — A
6.3-magnitude earthquake
struck Thursday off the Ore-
gon Coast but did not gener-
ate a tsunami or cause any
damage or injuries, authori-
ties said.
The epicenter of the
quake, which hit just after
8 a.m., was located about 150
miles from land at a depth of
7 miles in the Pacific Ocean.
The quake was caused
by slipping along an off-
shore fault called the Blanco
Fracture Zone and has noth-
ing to do with the more well-
known Cascadia fault, which
is believed to be overdue
for a major earthquake in
the Pacific Northwest, said
Paul Bodin, manager of the
Pacific Northwest Seismic
Network at the University of
Washington.
The event is also unre-
lated to a cluster of “episodic
slips” along the Cascadia
tectonic plate boundary that
have been releasing energy
across the coastal Pacific
Northwest over the past
week to 10 days, he said.
Those slips are not felt
by humans but have been
picked up by monitoring
SEVENDAY FORECAST FOR ASTORIA
TODAY
SUNDAY
MONDAY
devices around the Olym-
pic Peninsula in northwest
Washington state and also
stretching from Eugene to
the Siskiyou Mountains
along the Oregon-Califor-
nia border, according to the
Pacific Northwest Seismic
Network.
The slips along the Cas-
cadia relented two days ago
after a fairly active week,
Bodin said.
“Who
knows
what
Mother Earth is trying to tell
us, but as far as we know, the
earthquake today is ... at a
very unsurprising place,” he
said.
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THURSDAY
FRIDAY
REGIONAL FORECAST
Shown is today’s weather. Temperatures are today’s highs and tonight’s lows.
Seattle
68 57
An afternoon
shower
70 57
72 56
70 56
A couple of
showers
Decreasing
clouds
Partly sunny;
pleasant
70 55
Mostly sunny
71 55
70 55
High clouds
Showers
possible
Aberdeen
Olympia
69/61
75/63
Wenatchee
Tacoma
Moses
Lake
UNDER THE SKY
TODAY'S TIDES
Astoria through Thursday
Tonight’s Sky: The star Deneb,
high overhead, is the brightest
star in the constellation Cygnus,
the swan.
Astoria / Port Docks
Temperatures
High/low ................................ 71/58
Normal high/low .................. 69/52
Record high .................. 88 in 1944
Record low .................... 42 in 1985
Precipitation
Thursday ................................. 0.04”
Month to date ........................ 0.94”
Normal month to date ......... 1.05”
Year to date .......................... 25.65”
Normal year to date ........... 37.99”
Forecasts and graphics provided by
AccuWeather, Inc. ©2019
Source: Jim Todd, OMSI
Sunrise today .................. 6:34 a.m.
Sunset tonight ............... 7:57 p.m.
Moonrise today .............. 7:59 a.m.
Moonset today .............. 9:07 p.m.
First
Full
High (ft.) Time Low (ft.)
2:07 a.m.
3:02 p.m.
Last
1:41 a.m.
2:36 p.m.
1:53 a.m.
2:49 p.m.
Warrenton
2:02 a.m.
2:57 p.m.
Knappa
2:44 a.m.
3:39 p.m.
Depoe Bay
Aug 30 Sep 5 Sep 13 Sep 21
8.7 8:54 a.m. -1.6
7.9 9:09 p.m. 0.2
Cape Disappointment
Hammond
SUN AND MOON
New
Time
8.6 7:57 a.m. -2.0
7.7 8:11 p.m. 0.0
9.2 8:19 a.m. -1.9
8.2 8:34 p.m. 0.1
9.1 8:38 a.m. -1.5
8.3 8:53 p.m. 0.3
8.9 9:55 a.m. -1.4
8.2 10:10 p.m. 0.1
12:52 a.m. 9.3 7:26 a.m. -1.8
1:48 p.m. 8.4 7:41 p.m. 0.5
City
Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Dallas
Denver
Honolulu
Houston
Los Angeles
Miami
New York City
Phoenix
San Francisco
Wash., DC
Sun.
Hi/Lo/W
91/69/pc
79/62/pc
74/62/r
95/75/pc
91/61/pc
90/77/pc
94/74/pc
87/66/s
87/76/pc
80/63/s
110/85/s
76/60/pc
86/69/s
89/71/c
72/63/pc
76/62/c
96/74/s
96/64/s
90/77/pc
96/76/s
91/68/s
90/77/r
78/67/pc
106/86/pc
76/60/pc
83/69/pc
Weather (W): s-sunny, pc-partly cloudy,
c-cloudy, sh-showers, t-thunderstorms,
r-rain, sf-snow fl urries, sn-snow, i-ice.
87/58
Kennewick Walla Walla
91/65 Lewiston
95/66
94/64
Hermiston
The Dalles 94/66
Enterprise
Pendleton 86/52
90/62
89/61
La Grande
89/56
82/59
NATIONAL CITIES
Today
Hi/Lo/W
Pullman
91/57
75/59
Salem
87/61
Yakima 91/61
Longview
68/57 Portland
82/65
Spokane
89/63
75/57
74/55
Astoria
ALMANAC
now stands.
And the ancient people
who first settled at this loca-
tion apparently liked it there:
the archaeological site,
which contains fire pits full
of mammal bones (includ-
ing enamel from the tooth of
an extinct horse) and numer-
ous tools — signs that it was
visited by humans for thou-
sands of years. Indeed, the
region was known to the Nez
Perce Tribe as the site of an
ancient village named Nip.
If humans did arrive
in Idaho by following the
Columbia, there may be
more archaeological sites
along the river and its tribu-
taries. There’s just one prob-
lem: about 15,000 years
ago, the massive, land-
scape-shaping
Missoula
Floods swept down the
Columbia. They just missed
the location where Cooper’s
Ferry stands by a few kilo-
meters. Anything down-
stream at a lower elevation
would have been obliterated.
Davis thinks archaeolo-
gists could find more sites
by looking at higher-ele-
vation Columbia tributar-
ies, but he has no plans to
search for them yet. He’s got
10 years’ worth of artifacts
from Cooper’s Ferry to go
through.
Corvallis
82/56
Albany
82/59
John Day
Eugene
Bend
84/60
86/50
91/57
Ontario
98/59
Caldwell
Burns
90/46
96/56
Medford
91/62
Klamath Falls
84/46
City
Baker City
Brookings
Ilwaco
Newberg
Newport
Today
Hi/Lo/W
92/53/pc
69/56/pc
66/59/pc
81/59/pc
67/54/pc
Sun.
Hi/Lo/W
90/50/pc
68/56/c
68/58/sh
81/56/sh
67/54/sh
City
North Bend
Roseburg
Seaside
Springfi eld
Vancouver
Today
Hi/Lo/W
72/58/pc
87/65/pc
68/59/sh
85/62/pc
80/62/pc
Sun.
Hi/Lo/W
70/57/sh
84/60/c
70/58/sh
84/55/c
80/58/sh