<< Other Photo Pages >> Paisley Caves - Cave or Rock Shelter in United States in The West

Submitted by bat400 on Monday, 09 November 2009  Page Views: 22970

Natural PlacesSite Name: Paisley Caves Alternative Name: Paisley Five Mile Point Caves
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 96.344 km away from the location you searched for.
Region: The West Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
 Nearest Village: Paisley, OR
Latitude: 42.761300N  Longitude: 120.5514W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
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Paisley Caves
Paisley Caves submitted by bat400_photo : BLM photo - http://www.blm.gov/or/news/images/Fossil_Cannon_Cave5.jpg Paisley Caves, above the Summer lake plain, Oregon. In these caves some of the oldest human remains in North America were found. Bill Cannon, archaeologist of the BLM Lakeview, district in the center. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of A... (Vote or comment on this photo)
Group of eight Caves and Rock Shelters in Lake County, Oregon.
The present rock outcroppings in the desert of the Summer Lake Basin in Oregon were once islands. Two water levels on Five Mile Point existed and their wave action created caves that were uncovered when water levels dropped 17000 to 18000 years ago. Later, around 14,300 years ago, the remains of animals found their way into the caves, deposited by animal predators, and perhaps, by humans.

Fossilized feces, the oldest dated to 14,300 BP, contain human DNA and admixtures of the DNA of foxes, coyotes, and wolves. Whether the human DNA came from the feces of scavenging animals, or the animal DNA is from their urine layered over human feces, the remains are the hard evidence of mankind in the America's before the later ice age corridor opened inland. The DNA supports a Siberian migration to the New World, but one supported by boats traveling down the coast.

The Paisley caves were known for their deposits of Pleistocene fauna when Luther Cressman excavated in 1938. He found both ancient animal bone and human tools and hearths, but was unable to prove concurrent use of the caves. The 2006-2007 University of Oregon field school found the coprolites, later dated by a Danish team. The coprolites were at a level in the cave without man-made tools, although evidence of later human use of the caves include tools, twine, hearths, baskets and more coprolites.

The University of Oregon excavation is part of the Northern Great Basin Prehistory Project.

Note: See comment: Tool find supports age of Oregon cave Occupation as Pre-Clovis. One of Archaeology Magazine's Top 10 Stories of 2008.
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"Paisley Caves" | Login/Create an Account | 8 News and Comments
  
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Lockdown Video Talk: Passing through History: The Tales that Turds Tell by Andy B on Wednesday, 01 July 2020
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Includes discussion of dubious ancient faeces in Paisley Caves, part of FPAN's "Zoom into Archaeology" series:
Passing through History: The Tales that Turds Tell is by FPAN Public Archaeologist Tristan Harrenstein

Many think that archaeology is about finding arrowheads and bottles. Artifacts. Things. Actually though, archaeology is all about discovering the untold stories of our past and these things are merely a tool to help us reveal that past. While these artifacts may be pretty, sometimes the ugliest and most disgusting ones tell us the best stories. Join us to learn how ancient feces can produce amazing nuggets of truth about our past!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR9yGxzI0C0

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Western Stemmed points, more human DNA - 13,000 year-old tools pre-date Clovis by bat400 on Friday, 13 July 2012
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Archaeological work in Oregon's Paisley Caves has found evidence that Western Stemmed projectile points -- darts or thrusting spearheads -- were present at least 13,200 calendar years ago during or before the Clovis culture in western North America.

In a paper in the July 13 issue of Science, researchers from 13 institutions lay out their findings, which also include substantial new documentation, including "blind-test analysis" by independent labs, that confirms the human DNA pulled earlier from human coprolites (dried faeces) and reported in Science (May 9, 2008) dates to the same time period.

The new conclusions are based on 190 radiocarbon dates of artifacts, coprolites, bones and sagebrush twigs meticulously removed from well-stratified layers of silt in the ancient caves. Absent from the Paisley Caves, said the project's lead researcher Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, is diagnostic evidence of the Clovis culture such as the broad, concave-based, fluted Clovis projectile points.

The radiocarbon dating of the Western Stemmed projectiles to potentially pre-Clovis...

Thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link. For the article source, see http://phys.org/news/2012-07-paisley-caves-yield-year-western.html.
For a more detailed press release, see the University of Oregon website.
If you want to know more about Western Stemmed Points, see http://www.arrowheadology.com.
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Oldest American artefact unearthed at Oregon's Paisley Caves by bat400 on Monday, 09 November 2009
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Man-made Artifact Supports Coprolite Evidence Announced Last Year. Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artifact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

'The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.

'Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone's age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon. His team found the tool in a rock shelter overlooking a lake in south-central Oregon, one of a series of caves near the town of Paisley.

'Kevin Smith, the team member who uncovered the artifact, remembers the discovery. "We had bumped into a lot of extinct horse, bison and camel bone – then I heard and felt the familiar ring and feel when trowel hits bone," says Smith, now a master's student at California State University, Los Angeles. "I switched to a brush. Soon this huge bone emerged, then I saw the serrated edge. I stepped back and said: 'Hey everybody — we got something here.'"

'Whether the cave dwellers were Clovis people or belonged to an earlier culture is uncertain. None of the Clovis people's distinct fluted spear and arrow points have been found in the cave.

' "They can't yet rule out the Paisley Cave people weren't Clovis," says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon who wasn't involved in the research.

'The only other American archaeological site older than Clovis is at Monte Verde in Chile, which is about 13,900 years old.

'Last year, Jenkins and colleagues reported that Paisley Cave coprolites, or fossilized human excrement, dated to 14,000 to 14,270 years ago1. That report established the Paisley Caves as a key site for American archaeology.

'Analysis of ancient DNA marked the coprolites as human. But in July, another group argued that the coprolites might be younger than the sediments that contained them. This team, led by Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, also questioned the 2008 report because no artifacts had been found in the crucial sediments. The Oregon team strongly disputed the criticisms.

'The dating of the bone tool, and the finding that the sediments encasing it range from 11,930 to 14,480 years old, might put these questions to rest. "You couldn't ask for better dated stratigraphy," Jenkins told the Oregon meeting.'

For more, including a lively comment section that blasts "Nature" for its refusal to accept more American sites as predating the Clovis period, see Nature News.
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Re: Cave latrines: New evidence about prehistoric North America by Anonymous on Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Just wait until the Atlantic Coast is as well explored, after all the Topper site is on the Eastern portion of the States.
Perhaps the Beringian "poop-hunters" should be looking at Pedra Furada, and stop using the term "first" in applying to immigration of the Americas.
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Cave latrines: New evidence about prehistoric North America by bat400 on Wednesday, 14 January 2009
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More on the Paisley Cave's coprolites. Submitted by coldrum.

For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate.

Until now, they have found nothing conclusive.
But a few years ago, Dennis Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, and his students started digging where no one had dug before. What the team discovered in an alcove used as a latrine and trash dump has elevated the caves to the site of the oldest radiocarbon-dated human remains in North America.

Coprolites -- ancient feces -- were found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots and radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. That's 1,000 years before the oldest stone points of the Clovis culture, which ... was believed to represent the first people in North America.

The idea that coprolites contain valuable information is not new, but extracting DNA from them is. When the findings were published this year in the journal Science, they plopped Jenkins and his colleagues in the middle of one of the hottest debates in North American archaeology. Just when did people first come here, and how did they get here?

The Paisley coprolites indicate that people had found a... way, perhaps crossing the land bridge but then walking down the coast, or even crossing the ocean by boat, the way people went from New Guinea to Australia thousands of years earlier. The findings kill the suggestion that some of the earliest Americans came from Europe. And they almost didn't get to tell their story.

Bill Cannon calls himself a "used archaeological site salesman," but is really the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Lakeview District archaeologist. Cannon knew that Luther Cressman, a University of Oregon archaeologist, had dug here in the 1930s, as did numerous looters.

Cannon could see that there was a lot that hadn't been dug, and figured that Jenkins was the guy to do it. Jenkins is a senior research associate at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the head of its Northern Great Basin Archaeological Field School.

Jenkins has never found one of the distinctively shaped, fluted, stone spear points that mark the Clovis culture, named for a site near Clovis, N.M., uncovered in 1929. But in three digs at Paisley -- 2002, 2003 and 2007 -- Jenkins has gathered 700 coprolites, perhaps a third of them human.

The coprolites contain pollen, seeds, chipmunk bones, sage grouse feathers, trout scales, things that ancient people would have been eating, but Jenkins couldn't be sure that they weren't coyote. He had estimated their age at 1,000 years before Clovis from dating bone and obsidian flakes found nearby.

Unlike bone, obsidian cannot be radiocarbon dated. But the time since a flake was broken off can be estimated from how far moisture has penetrated, leaving a visible band. The distance depends on temperature, so to refine the measurements, archaeological consultant Tom Origer and his team from Santa Rosa, Calif., tracked the underground temperatures for a year.

At $600 a shot, Jenkins still didn't want to get any of the coprolites radiocarbon dated until he knew they were human.

Then in the fall of 2003, he received an unexpected e-mail from Alan Cooper of Oxford University, who was looking for sites to test with techniques he was developing to extract ancient DNA from soils.

Cooper and Jenkins arranged for Eske Willerslev, then a Danish postdoctoral fellow working for Cooper at Oxford, to deliver a paper on his work with ancient DNA before the Northwest Anthropological Conference. They also wanted Willerslev to pick up some samples from Paisley Caves. Willerslev took home 14 coprolites, though he was not very interested.

"To identify if humans were using caves as a t

Read the rest of this post...
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Re: Paisley Caves pre-Clovis remains. by Andy B on Tuesday, 08 April 2008
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Thanks for this. The rather unfortunate BBC News headline for this was "Faeces hint at first Americans"... No comment :)
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Paisley Caves pre-Clovis remains. by bat400 on Friday, 04 April 2008
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Here are a radio story on the find by NPR and the University of Oregon news release.

The research will be published in the upcoming issue of Nature.
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DNA analysis of Human faecal fragments found in caves point to Siberian origin by bat400 on Friday, 04 April 2008
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Originally submitted by aluta ---

Fossilised faeces found in a US cave may help solve the riddle of when and how humans came to the Americas.

The samples date back just over 14,000 years, before the time of the Clovis culture. Clovis people dominated North and Central America around 13,000 years ago, and whether any groups came before them has been controversial.

In the journal Science, the researchers describe how their conclusion hinged on modern genetic analysis.

The 14 faecal fragments were discovered in caves near a lake in the north-western US state of Oregon, among other signs of ancient human occupation.

"We found a little pit in the bottom of a cave," related Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, whose team excavated the Paisley Caves in 2002 and 2003.

"It was full of camel, horse and mountain sheep bones, and in there we found a human coprolite."

This and 13 other coprolites - fossilised faeces - proved the star attraction, because they contained tiny quantities of human mitochondrial DNA - genetic material found outside the nuclei of cells which is passed down from each mother to her children.

Several kinds of genetic analysis performed at several different laboratories confirmed that the DNA was human, and suggested the ancient cave residents were closely related to ethnic groups indigenous to Siberia and East Asia.


More at BBC News.
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