Submitted by coldrum -- Another article on the rockshelter with 16000 year old finds in North America. Now a National Historic Landmark.
Beer cans crumpled around a dead campfire, signs of late-night partying scorched into the sandstone. In a cutaway 15 feet below the modern fire circle, there's more charred stone, flecked with the shells of Ohio River mussels and the bones of passenger pigeons, both long extinct.
In between the two fire rings? The oldest known site of human habitation in North America, at least 16,000 years old.That's the surprise of Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft rock shelter, an inviting sandstone overhang in a tributary valley of the Ohio River that's been welcoming fishers, hunters and travelers since the Paleo-Indians. The site in Avella, 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, is now a National Historic Landmark, set amid towering sycamore and pawpaw trees. Its 52 carbon dates, in almost perfect stratigraphic order, reflect a continuous human record for 16,000-plus years.
"It was like a Paleo motel," guide Eleanor Crowe said. "People would come along Cross Creek, seven miles from the Ohio River, and stay here, from the earliest Paleo-Indians to the time of European settlement."
For more, see Dallas News.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road