Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas

Jessi J Halligan; Michael R Waters; Angelina Perrotti; Ivy J Owens; Joshua M Feinberg; Mark D Bourne; Brendan Fenerty; Barbara Winsborough; David Carlson; Daniel C Fisher; Thomas W Stafford Jr; James S Dunbar

doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600375

Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas

Sci Adv. 2016 May 13;2(5):e1600375. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1600375. eCollection 2016 May.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anthropology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
² Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.; Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.; Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
³ Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
⁴ Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QE, UK.; The Charles McBurney Laboratory for Geoarchaeology, Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK.
⁵ University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.; Institute for Rock Magnetism, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
⁶ Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
⁷ Texas Memorial Museum, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78705, USA.
⁸ Museum of Paleontology and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
⁹ Stafford Research Laboratories, Lafayette, CO 80026, USA.
¹⁰ Aucilla Research Institute Inc., 555 North Jefferson Street, Monticello, FL 32344, USA.

Abstract

Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged. Sporormiella and other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.

Keywords: Archaeology; Florida; Late Pleistocene; Megafauna Extinction; Page-Ladson; Paleoindian; Pre-Clovis; Prehistoric America; Sporormiella; underwater archaeology.

Publication types

Historical Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Animals
Archaeology*
Extinction, Biological
Florida
Fossils*
Geography
History, Ancient
Humans
Population Dynamics
Radiometric Dating