Clovis People Were Not Alone During Early Colonization 
of the Americas
By Kate Wong
Scientific American - Blogs
July 13, 2012 
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/13/clovis-people-had-company-in-early-colonization-of-the-americas/

Once upon a time, the initial migration of humans into
the New World looked like a very tidy story: the so-
called Clovis people, it appeared, were the first to
enter the Americas, arriving from Siberia by land bridge
and spreading across the continental U.S. in pursuit of
large game animals, leaving behind their telltale fluted
stone tools and other remains. But in recent years,
discoveries of remains that appear to pre-date the
Clovis culture have upended  that Clovis First scenario.
Now new findings from the Paisley Caves in Oregon join
the growing body of evidence that the human colonization
of the Americas was more complex than researchers once
thought, showing that a separate technological tradition
co-existed with the Clovis one and may well have
preceded it.

Previous work at the Paisley Caves had turned up
preserved human feces (coprolites) containing DNA and
some stone projectile points made in what archaeologists
term the Western Stemmed Tradition, which differs from
Clovis primarily in the way in which the point is
affixed to a dart shaft. Initial dating results
indicated that the remains rivaled Clovis in age, but
questions about their antiquity lingered. In the new
study, published in the July 13 Science, Dennis Jenkins
of the University of Oregon and his colleagues report on
high-precision radiocarbon dating of more than 100 new
samples from Paisley Caves that establish the chronology
of the site and put the oldest stone points at more than
13,000 years old, making them at least as old as the
oldest known Clovis artifacts elsewhere.

The Clovis First theory predicts that the Western
Stemmed technology evolved from the Clovis one, yet no
Clovis tools or tools that look like they could have
given rise to Clovis have turned up in Paisley Caves.
Thus although Western Stemmed might share a common
ancestral technology with Clovis, it does not come out
of the Clovis lineage itself, Jenkins asserted in a
press teleconference. In the Science paper he and his
colleagues conclude: "The Paisley Caves evidence
supports the hypothesis that the [Western Stemmed
Technology] was an indigenous development in the far
western United States, whereas Clovis may have developed
independently in the Plains and Southeast." The findings
buttress claims for a non Clovis-derived tool-making
tradition at the site of Monte Verde in Chile, Jenkins
added, noting "this really seems to suggest there are
multiple technology trajectories at the same time here
at the end of the Pleistocene in the Western
Hemisphere."

The investigators also recovered more coprolites
containing mitochondrial DNA (which is maternally
inherited, as opposed to nuclear DNA, which is inherited
from both parents) from the site, taking precautions to
ensure the samples were not contaminated with foreign
DNA. Sequencing confirmed earlier work indicating that
the Paisley Cave folks carried the so-called haplogroup
A mitochondrial lineage that is common among Native
Americans today and is thought to have originated in
Asia. Team member Eske Willerslev of the University of
Copenhagen said in the press teleconference that the
Paisley Cave people were Asian in origin and possibly
related to or ancestral to modern day Native Americans.
To nail the relationship down further , he said, the
researchers will need to retrieve nuclear DNA from the
coprolites.

The oldest coprolite at the site was radiocarbon dated
to 14,500 years ago, making it the oldest directly dated
human remain in the western hemisphere and older than
the oldest point from the site by more than a thousand
years. Whether the person who left behind that turd made
tools in the Western Stemmed fashion is unknown, but
study co-author Loren Davis of Oregon State University
said in a statement that the DNA from that coprolite
resembles the DNA from a coprolite that is the same age
as the oldest points. "They were from the same genetic
group," he said.

According to Davis, more evidence that the Western
Stemmed people were as early or earlier than the Clovis
people may come from the site of Coopers Ferry in
western Idaho, which contains points that have been
preliminarily dated to 13,200 years ago-an age that he
and his colleagues are working to confirm. As for the
Paisley Caves, although more archaeological material
remains to be unearthed there, Jenkins has terminated
the excavations in order to preserve the contents for
future archaeologists armed with improved study tools
and methodologies. Analyses of materials already
recovered from the site will continue, however.

In 2011, archaeologists working at the Debra L. Friedkin
site in Texas reported on their discovery of thousands
of stone tools dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years
ago that were also distinct from Clovis points. That
assemblage was found under a level containing Clovis
tools, however, and researchers involved in the
discovery suggested that the Clovis style of projectile
manufacture may have derived from that earlier
tradition. No such technological precursor is known for
Western Stemmed projectiles.

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