© Gault School of Archaeological ResearchThe pre-Clovis artifacts include more than 90 stone tools, such as bifaces and blades, and more than 160,000 flakes left over from the point-making process.
Archaeologists in Texas thought they'd made an important discovery in the 1990s, when they unearthed a trove of stone tools dating back 13,000 years, revealing traces of the oldest widespread culture on the continent.
But then, years later, they made an even more powerful find in the same place — another layer of artifacts that were older still.
About a half-hour north of Austin and a meter deep in water-logged silty clay, researchers have
uncovered evidence of human occupation dating back as much as 16,700 years, including fragments of human teeth and more than 90 stone tools.In addition to being some of the oldest yet found in the American West, the artifacts are rare traces of a culture that predated the culture known as Clovis, whose distinctively shaped stone tools found across North America have consistently been dated to about 13,000 years ago.
Indeed, an entire generation of anthropologists was taught that Clovis represented the continent's first inhabitants.
But, along with a handful of other pre-Clovis finds, the Texas tools add to the mounting evidence that humans arrived on the continent longer ago than was once thought, said Dr. D. Clark Wernecke, director of the
Gault School of Archaeological Research.
"The most important takeaway is that people were in the New World much earlier than we used to believe," Wernecke said.
"We were all taught [North America was first populated] 13,500 years ago, and it appears that people arrived 15,000 to 20,000 years ago."
The location in Texas where the new finds were made, known as the Gault site, was first identified in the 1920s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that archaeologists discovered the first tools, like tapered-oval spear heads, that were clear signs of the ancient Clovis culture.
It was those finds that Wernecke and his colleagues went to investigate further, when they began working at the Gault site in 2002.
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