Poop Casts Doubt on ‘first Americans’ #
I tried my best to write an absurd headline for this. In any case, this should probably be filed as “strange but true.” It turns out recently analyzed fossilized feces
…push back the date when humanity arrived in the Americas. Traditionalists have long believed that the first Americans belonged to what is known as the Clovis culture, after a style of arrowhead found first at Clovis, New Mexico, but which has turned up at several other locations. Clovis sites are 13,000 years old at most.
…Their data support the idea that there were people in America before Clovis. They also suggest that at least some of those people were the ancestors of modern Amerindians. That is because the Oregonian coprolites contain DNA that has characteristics which match that of living Amerindians.