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Scientists
are not in agreement as to when people entered the Western
Hemisphere.
Some findings being discussed among
archaeologists are the pre-Clovis
dates and tools from a site named Cactus Hill in southern
Virginia. Here a small band of people lived on top of a sandy hill
overlooking the Nottoway River. One
piece of white pine was radiocarbon dated to almost 17,000 years
ago. Associated
with the pine were stone tools and the raw material from which
the tools were made. These
findings are challenging prevailing theories regarding human
settlement of North America.
If
people lived in Virginia 17,000 years ago, then scientists will
need to review how people entered the Western Hemisphere.
The accepted theory, as presented earlier, held that man entered Alaska from Asia
walking across Beringia and migrated south to the Great Plains,
passing through an "ice-free" corridor between the huge
Cordilleran and Laurentide glaciers.
People could not have walked down the Pacific coastline
of Canada because many glaciers flowing down from the mountains
into the water would have blocked their path.
But the ice-free corridor between the two glaciers opened
later than Cactus Hill, between 14,500 and 13,000 years ago.
With
an interior route blocked with ice, archaeologists are looking
once again to the coast for an alternative path south.
Archaeologists now speculate that a culture, using boats,
and hunting marine and land mammals, moved
along the coast of Beringia, down the coast of Canada, the United
States, and Central America into South America.
Descendents of the people then migrated
into the heartland of North and South America, eventually ending
up in the area now known as Virginia.
A few archaeologists have turned to Europe and Australia for another hypothesis.
They suggest that people living on the Iberian Peninsula
(present-day Spain and Portugal) or Australia took to boats and
traveled to the Western Hemisphere by passing along the edge of
ice sheets in the north Atlantic and south Pacific oceans. These people,
also, would have been adapted to fishing and hunting sea
mammals.
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Very old cores and blade
flakes.
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