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Published online 3 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.734
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Fossil faeces pinpoint earliest North Americans
Evidence confirms humans were in the Americas more than 14,000 years ago.
Some 14,300-year-old fossilized human faeces have been found in Oregon, offering the oldest firm evidence yet of humans in North America, and the oldest human DNA in all the Americas.
The material establishes a new benchmark for when founding groups could have roamed into North America, and helps to confirm previous studies showing people living in South America around this time.
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This does not surprise me, since I suspect that several North American tribes have myths that date back that far. In a paper in press in Geografiska Annaler I suggest that the Lakota myth of the Unktehi, a water monster that dammed the Missouri and caused The Great Flood, could refer to a hypothetical jökulhlaup 14,600 years ago, which in turn is linked to the Bölling warming. Another tribe along the lower Mississippi has a related flood myth that could be a memory of the same event, when the waters reached "the mountains". I believe that a systematic study of Native American myths could be a great help in understanding the past, since the cultural memory seems to be longer there than in, e.g., Europe.