Deadly sharp points found in Idaho could be first American-made tools | Science

Lethally sharp projectile points found along the banks of a river in southwestern Idaho, dated to nearly 16,000 years ago, could represent the oldest evidence of the first tool technology brought to the Americas.

Apparently deposited into a series of shallow pits by an ancient group of hunter-gatherers, the points are examples of “stemmed point technology,” which allowed people back then to fashion spear tips from a wide range of available materials. Based on the objects’ similarities to earlier artifacts, their discovers argue, the blueprint for making them may have come from East Asia.

A lot more work will need to be done to prove that point, as it were, notes Heather Smith, an archaeologist at Texas State University who wasn’t involved in the study. But “at face value,” she says, “it looks like a really interesting agenda to pursue.”

The site where the points were unearthed a few years ago is on the banks of Idaho’s Salmon River. The Nez Perce people, who have inhabited the region for thousands of years, refer to it as Nipéhe, for an ancient village there. In English, it became known as Cooper’s Ferry.

Sixteen thousand years ago, the river sat in an ice-free corridor inside a glacial amphitheater left by the tailend of an ice age. At the time, an overland route into the North American continent from the Bering Strait would have been blocked by massive ice sheets. But some researchers have proposed that the earliest migrants from Siberia could have boated along the ice-covered Bering Strait’s shores and down the Pacific coast.

“If you’re coming south along the Pacific coastline entering North America … the first major lefthand turn south of the ice is the Columbia River, and if you head upstream, you can get to Cooper’s Ferry,” says Loren Davis, an Oregon State University, Corvallis, archaeologist who led the new study.

Situated at a higher elevation than much of the surrounding landscape, Cooper’s Ferry was left relatively unscathed over the subsequent centuries by devastating floods and avalanches that destroyed or buried the surrounding valleys, he says. “As far as we can tell, people early on decided this was a really great place to live, and they kept coming back over and over and over again.”

That tracks with Nez Perce history, says Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the cultural resources program director for the tribe, on whose lands the artifact-filled site sits. Stories passed down over thousands of years tell of a young couple founding the village after a catastrophic flood destroyed their previous home across the river.

Davis began working at the site in 1997 as a graduate student and never left. In 2019, he and colleagues published a paper in Science that included radiocarbon dates obtained from bits of bone and charcoal excavated in collaboration with the Nez Perce Tribe. The oldest dates put the village somewhere between 16,560 and 15,280 years old, making it one of the earliest known human-occupied sites on the continent. But these dates were ultimately approximations, based on a combination of younger radiocarbon dates and statistical extrapolation.

For the new work, published today in Science Advances, Davis’s team—including interns from the Nez Perce Tribe—turned to a site that had first been excavated in the 1960s, just 25 meters upriver from the previous spot. Digging below the surface, they found three cylindrical pits that had been hollowed from the earth. Inside were hundreds of bits of animal bone—Davis doesn’t think they’re human, but beyond that, he can’t be sure—as well as 13 carefully worked stone projectile ends known as stemmed points, after the protruding stems used to haft them onto the tips of spears.

A radiocarbon dating lab at the University of Oxford dated several of the animal bones to between about 16,000 and 15,600 years ago, firming up the dates for the overall site reported in the earlier study.

Smith says the new study brings “needed rigor” to the earlier study’s dates, and she has confidence in them. But Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, remains unconvinced, arguing the artifacts from the pits are too jumbled to conclusively link them to any of the animal-bone dates. “Their precise age remains unclear, in my opinion.”

Although no genetic evidence connects the ancient toolmakers to modern Nez Perce people, Williamson-Cloud says he believes his tribe is “most definitely” their descendants. “These are truly our ancestors,” he says. “They aren’t just nameless Paleoindian people, and it’s not some nameless site. It’s a place where our lineage came from—people who are alive today.”

The rough-and-ready stemmed projectile points, made from whatever rocks were on hand, differ significantly from so-called Clovis points. Knapped from higher-quality stone, with fluted ends that were wedged into spear tips, Clovis points came to dominate the continent’s toolmaking landscape about 13,000 years ago.

Most archaeologists once believed these Clovis points belonged to the continent’s first settlers. The discovery of several sites with human artifacts that predated Clovis points dashed that notion, but left open the question of which toolmaking technology did accompany these earliest migrants.

Davis and the other authors, which include Japanese and Chinese archaeologists, think there’s a good case to be made they brought along stemmed points. The points at Cooper’s Ferry, they say, most closely resemble projectile points made by people who lived near modern-day Hokkaido, Japan, some 20,000 years ago.

Genetic studies show these people were not ancestors of modern Native Americans, but Davis believes their technological tradition may have passed into other Asian groups that did ultimately migrate through northeastern Siberia and into the Americas. “[Those travelers] didn’t invent this stuff when they got to the Americas,” he says. “When they left northeast Asia, they had a whole set of technological ideas in their minds.”

Davis’ scenario makes sense to Matthew Des Lauriers, an archaeologist at California State University, San Bernardino, who studies stone tool technologies. He agrees the stemmed points from Cooper’s Ferry and Hokkaido appear to share “a similar set of design principles and engineering.” The notion dovetails with his own work on Cedros Island off the coast of Baja California where he says 11,500-year-old fishhooks made from shells appear strikingly similar to 23,000-year-old shell fishhooks from Okinawa, Japan.

David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, remains skeptical. He says the similarities between the two regions’ stemmed points appear generic and “could just as readily be a result of convergence as opposed to historical relatedness,” he says. Finding more evidence at sites in between Japan and the U.S. Pacific Northwest would help make the authors’ case, he adds, but “detecting actual links between populations so distant in space and time can only be done reliably with ancient genomics.”

Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, agrees that data from more coastal and northwestern North American sites would increase his confidence in the East Asian connection, as would a more detailed explanation of the similarities in flaking technique used to produce both regions’ stemmed points. Still, he says the study of the Idaho points is overall very thorough. One question he’d like to see explored: Why did these ancient people throw perfectly good projectile points into pits as if they were garbage? “It’s very interesting, very curious.”

Lethally sharp projectile points found along the banks of a river in southwestern Idaho, dated to nearly 16,000 years ago, could represent the oldest evidence of the first tool technology brought to the Americas.

Apparently deposited into a series of shallow pits by an ancient group of hunter-gatherers, the points are examples of “stemmed point technology,” which allowed people back then to fashion spear tips from a wide range of available materials. Based on the objects’ similarities to earlier artifacts, their discovers argue, the blueprint for making them may have come from East Asia.

A lot more work will need to be done to prove that point, as it were, notes Heather Smith, an archaeologist at Texas State University who wasn’t involved in the study. But “at face value,” she says, “it looks like a really interesting agenda to pursue.”

The site where the points were unearthed a few years ago is on the banks of Idaho’s Salmon River. The Nez Perce people, who have inhabited the region for thousands of years, refer to it as Nipéhe, for an ancient village there. In English, it became known as Cooper’s Ferry.

Sixteen thousand years ago, the river sat in an ice-free corridor inside a glacial amphitheater left by the tailend of an ice age. At the time, an overland route into the North American continent from the Bering Strait would have been blocked by massive ice sheets. But some researchers have proposed that the earliest migrants from Siberia could have boated along the ice-covered Bering Strait’s shores and down the Pacific coast.

“If you’re coming south along the Pacific coastline entering North America … the first major lefthand turn south of the ice is the Columbia River, and if you head upstream, you can get to Cooper’s Ferry,” says Loren Davis, an Oregon State University, Corvallis, archaeologist who led the new study.

Situated at a higher elevation than much of the surrounding landscape, Cooper’s Ferry was left relatively unscathed over the subsequent centuries by devastating floods and avalanches that destroyed or buried the surrounding valleys, he says. “As far as we can tell, people early on decided this was a really great place to live, and they kept coming back over and over and over again.”

That tracks with Nez Perce history, says Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the cultural resources program director for the tribe, on whose lands the artifact-filled site sits. Stories passed down over thousands of years tell of a young couple founding the village after a catastrophic flood destroyed their previous home across the river.

Davis began working at the site in 1997 as a graduate student and never left. In 2019, he and colleagues published a paper in Science that included radiocarbon dates obtained from bits of bone and charcoal excavated in collaboration with the Nez Perce Tribe. The oldest dates put the village somewhere between 16,560 and 15,280 years old, making it one of the earliest known human-occupied sites on the continent. But these dates were ultimately approximations, based on a combination of younger radiocarbon dates and statistical extrapolation.

For the new work, published today in Science Advances, Davis’s team—including interns from the Nez Perce Tribe—turned to a site that had first been excavated in the 1960s, just 25 meters upriver from the previous spot. Digging below the surface, they found three cylindrical pits that had been hollowed from the earth. Inside were hundreds of bits of animal bone—Davis doesn’t think they’re human, but beyond that, he can’t be sure—as well as 13 carefully worked stone projectile ends known as stemmed points, after the protruding stems used to haft them onto the tips of spears.

A radiocarbon dating lab at the University of Oxford dated several of the animal bones to between about 16,000 and 15,600 years ago, firming up the dates for the overall site reported in the earlier study.

Smith says the new study brings “needed rigor” to the earlier study’s dates, and she has confidence in them. But Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, remains unconvinced, arguing the artifacts from the pits are too jumbled to conclusively link them to any of the animal-bone dates. “Their precise age remains unclear, in my opinion.”

Although no genetic evidence connects the ancient toolmakers to modern Nez Perce people, Williamson-Cloud says he believes his tribe is “most definitely” their descendants. “These are truly our ancestors,” he says. “They aren’t just nameless Paleoindian people, and it’s not some nameless site. It’s a place where our lineage came from—people who are alive today.”

The rough-and-ready stemmed projectile points, made from whatever rocks were on hand, differ significantly from so-called Clovis points. Knapped from higher-quality stone, with fluted ends that were wedged into spear tips, Clovis points came to dominate the continent’s toolmaking landscape about 13,000 years ago.

Most archaeologists once believed these Clovis points belonged to the continent’s first settlers. The discovery of several sites with human artifacts that predated Clovis points dashed that notion, but left open the question of which toolmaking technology did accompany these earliest migrants.

Davis and the other authors, which include Japanese and Chinese archaeologists, think there’s a good case to be made they brought along stemmed points. The points at Cooper’s Ferry, they say, most closely resemble projectile points made by people who lived near modern-day Hokkaido, Japan, some 20,000 years ago.

Genetic studies show these people were not ancestors of modern Native Americans, but Davis believes their technological tradition may have passed into other Asian groups that did ultimately migrate through northeastern Siberia and into the Americas. “[Those travelers] didn’t invent this stuff when they got to the Americas,” he says. “When they left northeast Asia, they had a whole set of technological ideas in their minds.”

Davis’ scenario makes sense to Matthew Des Lauriers, an archaeologist at California State University, San Bernardino, who studies stone tool technologies. He agrees the stemmed points from Cooper’s Ferry and Hokkaido appear to share “a similar set of design principles and engineering.” The notion dovetails with his own work on Cedros Island off the coast of Baja California where he says 11,500-year-old fishhooks made from shells appear strikingly similar to 23,000-year-old shell fishhooks from Okinawa, Japan.

David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, remains skeptical. He says the similarities between the two regions’ stemmed points appear generic and “could just as readily be a result of convergence as opposed to historical relatedness,” he says. Finding more evidence at sites in between Japan and the U.S. Pacific Northwest would help make the authors’ case, he adds, but “detecting actual links between populations so distant in space and time can only be done reliably with ancient genomics.”

Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, agrees that data from more coastal and northwestern North American sites would increase his confidence in the East Asian connection, as would a more detailed explanation of the similarities in flaking technique used to produce both regions’ stemmed points. Still, he says the study of the Idaho points is overall very thorough. One question he’d like to see explored: Why did these ancient people throw perfectly good projectile points into pits as if they were garbage? “It’s very interesting, very curious.”