Archaeologica.org

The discovery strengthens the case for two theories that traditional archaeologists laughed at not long ago--that the first Americans came earlier than 13,000 years ago, and that they didn't walk over a land bridge into North America from Siberia, but came by skin boats at least 16,000 years ago (or long before) skirting along coastlines of the Aleutian Islands and then Alaska, Canada and America.

Waters believes they came by boat, hunting seals beside Ice Age glaciers a few miles at a time, surviving Ice Age weather, bringing families and pet dogs. He thinks the first colonies in America sprouted tens of thousands of years ago along the Columbia River basin between Washington and Oregon, a region he said archaeologists should re-explore with renewed vigor.

Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2011/03/24/177756 ... z1HZir5Eeh

Professor Gary Haynes, from the University of Nevada in Reno, US, praised the "good work" by the research team.

But he said it was plausible that natural processes could have caused some stone tools to migrate downwards in the clay - giving the impression of a pre-Clovis layer.

Waters believes they came by boat, hunting seals beside Ice Age glaciers a few miles at a time, surviving Ice Age weather, bringing families and pet dogs. He thinks the first colonies in America sprouted tens of thousands of years ago along the Columbia River basin between Washington and Oregon, a region he said archaeologists should re-explore with renewed vigor.

"Kansas is right in the bulls-eye for activity by the Paleo Indians," said Waters, a professor of anthropology and geography at Texas A&M and director of Center for the Study of the First Americans.

Two sites worked by Rolfe Mandel, a geoarchaeologist with the Kansas Geological Survey, and others near Kanorado and at Lovewell Reservoir in Jewell County might roll back the time by thousands of years.