First people in the Americas came by sea, ancient tools unearthed by Idaho river suggest.

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Ancient people apparently followed rivers more than 500 kilometers inland to Cooper's Ferry in western Idaho.LOREN DAVIS
▼ About 16,000 years ago, on the banks of a river in western Idaho, people kindled fires, shaped stone blades and spearpoints, and butchered large mammals. All were routine activities in prehistory, but their legacy today is anything but. The charcoal and bone left at that ancient site, now called Cooper’s Ferry, are some 16,000 years old— the oldest  radiocarbon-dated record of  human presence in North  America, according to work  reported this week in Science.
The findings do more than add a few centuries to the timeline of people in the Americas. They also shore up a new picture of how humans first arrived, by showing that people lived at Cooper’s Ferry more than 1 millennium before melting glaciers opened an ice-free corridor through Canada about 14,800 years ago. That implies the first people in the Americas must have come by sea, moving rapidly down the Pacific coast and up rivers. The dates from Cooper’s Ferry “fit really nicely with the [coastal] model that we’re increasingly getting a consensus on from genetics and archaeology,” says Jennifer Raff, a geneticist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who studies the peopling of the Americas.
The Clovis people, big game hunters who made characteristic stone tools dated to about 13,000 years ago, were once thought to have been the first to reach the Americas, presumably through the ice-free corridor. But a handful of earlier sites have persuaded many researchers that the coastal  route is more likely. Archaeologists have questioned the signs of occupation at some putative pre-Clovis sites, but the stone tools and dating at Cooper’s Ferry pass the test with flying colors, says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. “It’s pre-Clovis. I’m convinced.”
Over 10 years of excavations, the Cooper’s Ferry team uncovered dozens of stone spear points, blades, and multipurpose tools called bifaces, as well as hundreds of pieces of debris from their manufacture. Although the site is near the Salmon River, most of the ancient bones belonged to mammals, including extinct horses. The team also found a hearth and pits dug by the site’s ancient residents, containing stone artifacts and animal bones.
Radiocarbon dates on the charcoal and bone are as old as 15,500 years. In North America, few tree ring records can precisely calibrate such early radiocarbon dates, but (▪ ▪ ▪)

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