13,500 Year Old Artifacts Saluda River South Carolina

[MFK6]

Here is some news out of South Carolina for another pre-Clovis find.
http://www.thestate.com/local/story/755229.html

[Minimalist]

“Rivers like that were prehistoric highways,” said Albert Goodyear of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Right.


Because they had boats!

[MFK6]

I agree with you Miinimalist! While we haven't found a boat; aren't there rock carvings and paintings of boats around the country? Since these boats may have been fragile, it may be impossible to recover any in the sediments at the pre-glacial melt coastlines. No information of boat discoveries from old journals during the 18th and 19th century destruction of hundreds of mounds and fort areas found by early settlers. Sorry our earliest inhabitants here did not bury their dead like the Vikings......I can only imagine they were very practical.

[Minimalist]

Absolutely, Mary. In fact, unless you are going to build a boat out of stone...not a real good idea....the odds are that it is going to be made out of a rather short-duration organic matrerial: wood, hide, a combination of both. Moreover, the whole point of a boat is to use it in water which implies a degree of exposure to the elements.

This really (really) is a situation where you have to look at the tree on the forest floor and conclude that it fell whether you heard it or not. For mankind to have reached islands it must be conceded that they:

A- Walked to them
B- Swam to them
C- Sailed to them
D- Flew to them

As we have even less evidence for Holocene aircraft than watercraft it seems reasonable to dismiss any notion of flight until such time as evidence is produced. Likewise, if the water is more than six feet deep it seems unlikely that any group would be able to walk across and swimming was probably only employed by people who fell off the boats.

At some point logic and reason has to trump the lack of perishable artifacts.

[Digit]

Having done a fair bit of inland boating in my youth I fail to understand how the 'experts' are so reluctant to embrace the obvious, as usual.
Humping a back pack across difficult terrain is a lot less fun than paddling a canoe that's for sure!

Roy.

[Minimalist]

It's also a lot more dangerous. A nice gentle stream to paddle gives one a lot of protection from predators who rarely employ frogman tactics in the wild!