Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas. Academic Article uri icon

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.

published proceedings

  • Sci Adv

altmetric score

  • 966.146

author list (cited authors)

  • Halligan, J. J., Waters, M. R., Perrotti, A., Owens, I. J., Feinberg, J. M., Bourne, M. D., ... Dunbar, J. S.

citation count

  • 149

complete list of authors

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

publication date

  • May 2016