A new study has zeroed-in to mapping out how and where prehistoric Native Americans first entered North America. No, it’s not an excavated land or fossils of a Native Americans’ bones unearthed that narrowed down the search results – but a trail of stone arrowheads used by those prehistoric humans.
A total of 216 stone arrowheads were found in states including Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Maine and Texas. Analyzing these arrowheads under the new study also reveal the manner in which the Native Americans populated the rest of the continent thereafter.
Clovis points, as these early arrowheads are called, help researchers point toward an Asian origin of the Paleo-Indians.
Buchanan, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia said,
More specifically, the data supports an entry in the Northern Plains, close to where the southern opening of the ice-free corridor would have been.
Accepted for publication in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the findings raises the question — Is it possible that Clovis represents a colonizing population, but not the first population to colonize the New World?
Cuing up with the rising queries, early Paleo-Indian specialist Todd Surovell says that they clearly need to work more to get on to it.
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