RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas
JF Science Advances
JO Sci Adv
FD American Association for the Advancement of Science
SP e1600375
DO 10.1126/sciadv.1600375
VO 2
IS 5
A1 Halligan, Jessi J.
A1 Waters, Michael R.
A1 Perrotti, Angelina
A1 Owens, Ivy J.
A1 Feinberg, Joshua M.
A1 Bourne, Mark D.
A1 Fenerty, Brendan
A1 Winsborough, Barbara
A1 Carlson, David
A1 Fisher, Daniel C.
A1 Stafford, Thomas W.
A1 Dunbar, James S.
YR 2016
UL http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/e1600375.abstract
AB Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged. Sporormiella and other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.