Clues Imply Earlier Human Habitation

A South Carolina archeologist says he has evidence that humans were camping along the Savannah River 50,000 years ago, long before most researchers believe our ancestors reached this continent.

Albert C. Goodyear III of the University of South Carolina has excavated what appears to be a hearth in the lower levels of the famous Topper site in a South Carolina quarry where researchers have been digging for more than 20 years. The presumed hearth contains what looks like primitive stone tools, primarily knives and hammers.

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal remnants from the hearth performed by a team at UC Irvine shows that they are at least 50,000 years old, which would make the artifacts the oldest human leavings discovered in the Americas. Goodyear announced the results Wednesday at a news conference.

Currently, the oldest confirmed human artifacts in North America date from about 13,000 years ago. At least two sites in South America are thought to be 30,000 years old or older, but researchers are not in agreement about whether those sites contain human tools or rocks that have flaked and weathered.

Critics charge that the same thing has happened at the Topper site. “The stones were fractured by nature and ended up resembling tools,” said archeologist Michael Collins of the University of Texas, a critic of the claims for earlier habitation.

Although most researchers believe that the main wave of migration to the Americas from Asia was about 15,000 years ago, across a land bridge that then spanned the Bering Strait, a growing number now speculate that there may have been other influxes, either earlier or later, by ships across the ocean or by smaller craft that navigated the coastline.