Underwater archaeologists and other researchers have taken a second look at a sinkhole 30 feet deep, 200 feet wide, in the Aucilla River in northern Florida that is rich with remnants of stone tools, as well as fossilized mastodon bones and dung.
Although scientists had studied the location, known as the Page-Ladson site, for more than a decade and knew how old some of the material was, they could not come up with definitive evidence that humans and mastodons were there at the same time.
Now, the researchers say, the discovery of an unmistakable human artifact, a stone knife fragment, embedded in sand and dung that allowed for exact dating, proves that paleoindians, as archaeologists call the first people to come to North America, colonized northern Florida by 14,550 years ago.
The Associated Press, reported in the May 14, 2016 Atlanta Constitution, p. 3a, that the journal Science Advances broke the story.
The Page-Ladson site is named for Buddy Page, a diver who first discovered it, and the Ladson family, which owns the sink hole, located in the Aucilla River, 30 miles southeast of Tallahassee, about seven miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
Mike Waters, the director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University and a principal investigator on the latest Page-Ladson report, said: “What we tried to do at Page-Ladson is make a really strong case that would be unassailable…that these artifacts are manmade and they’re exactly where those people left them 14,550 years ago.”
The project involved years of painstaking excavation in the Aucilla River, a slow-moving, coffee-colored waterway shaded by cypress trees and inhabited by alligators. Underwater archaeologists dug up and dated layer after layer of sediment from the river’s bottom, sifting through each patch of dirt for evidence that humans had once been there.
They uncovered what report co-author, Tom Stafford, calls a “chronological layer cake.” More than 70 samples of ancient organic material taken from the site and radiocarbon dated at Stafford’s lab showed that each layer was slightly older than the one above it. They prove that nothing had disturbed or mixed up the sediments as they were laid down over time.
By the time archaeologists reached the 14,500-year-old stratum, they began to find objects they say could only have come from humans: five sharpened rocks that were carried in from elsewhere in the area and a double-sided stone knife, or bi-face, that would have been among the most advanced technologies of the time. The team then reexamined the mastodon tusk found by James Dunbar and David Webb in the 1980’s, who were also in on this 2012 excavation, and determined that the mastodon was most likely butchered by humans.
The discovery of tools and a butchered mastodon bone suggest that humans and these large animals coexisted for at least 1,500 years.
Bully for both Jefferson and Madison Counties, in North Florida.
-Nelson Pryor