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I laughed at the pre-Clovis site claim in Texas, then the dates came back
Back in 2018 I heard about the Gault site dig near Austin and figured it was another overhyped media thing. I mean, everyone knows Clovis-first was the textbook answer for decades, so who was this team to say people were there 16,000 years ago? Then I actually went to one of their public open houses and saw the stratigraphy myself, plus they had those white chert flakes pulled from layers below any Clovis point. The kicker was when they showed us the radiocarbon table from 2021, something like 40 samples all lining up. That was the moment I stopped trusting old textbooks so hard. Has anyone else visited a dig site that made them flip on a long held belief?
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jesseb201mo ago
That Texas site really got my attention too when the dates came back. I read somewhere that the Gault project found over 150,000 artifacts in those older layers, which is just a crazy number for something that supposedly didn't exist. The part that got me was the fire pits and the butchered mammoth bones they dug up below the Clovis line. If those radiocarbon samples are right, then people were building fires and hunting big game there thousands of years before the Clovis culture was even a thing. It makes you wonder how many other sites got ignored just because they didn't fit the old timeline. I never made it out to Texas, but I followed the updates online and it honestly changed how I read any archaeology news now.
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