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Archaeological sites older than the Roman Empire and the pyramids can be found in many US states.

These sites shed light on the first humans who arrived in North America.

Some are closed to the public, but tourists can visit several of them to glimpse the distant past.

The US is less than 250 years old, but some of its most important archaeological sites are older than the Viking seafarers, the Roman Empire, and the pyramids.

Many help tell the story of how the first humans came to North America. It’s still a mystery exactly how and when people arrived, though it’s widely believed they crossed the Bering Strait at least 15,000 years ago.

“As we get further back in time, as we get populations that are smaller and smaller, finding these places and interpreting them becomes increasingly difficult,” archaeologist Kenneth Feder told Business Insider. He’s the author of “Ancient America: Fifty Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself.”

Some sites, like White Sands and Cooper’s Ferry, have skeptics about the accuracy of their age. Still, they contribute to our understanding of some of the earliest Americans.

Others are more recent and highlight the different cultures that were spreading around the country, with complex buildings and illuminating pictographs.

Many of these places are open to the public, so you can see the US’ ancient history for yourself.

White Sands National Park, New Mexico

Prehistoric camels, mammoths, and giant sloths roam what is now New Mexico, when it is greener and wetter.

As the climate warmed about 11,000 years ago, the water in Lake Otero receded, revealing traces of humans living among those extinct animals. Some even gave the impression of following a sloth, providing a rare insight into the habit of ancient hunters.

Recent studies place some of those fossilized footprints between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. If the dates are accurate, the prints predate other archaeological sites in the United States, raising interesting questions about who those other people were and how they got to the southwestern state.

“Where do they come from?” Feder said. They don’t harden in New Mexico. They will have to have come from somewhere else, which means there are still older sites. “Archaeologists simply haven’t discovered them yet.

While it can absorb the namesake white sands, the footprints are recently banned.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania

In the 1970s, archaeologist James M. Adovasio sparked controversy when he and his colleagues that the stone equipment and other artifacts discovered in southwestern Pennsylvania belonged to humans who had lived in the domain 16,000 years ago.

Over decades, scientists have uncovered evidence of human habitation that everyone gave the impression of being between 12,000 and 13,000 years old, belonging to the Clovis culture. For a long time, they were the first to cross the Bering land bridge. Humans who arrived in North America before this organization are known as pre-clovis.

At the time, skeptics said radiocarbon dating evidence was flawed, AP News reported in 2016. In the years since, more sites that appear to be 13,000 years older have been discovered in the United States.

Feder said that Adovasio had meticulously excavated the site, however, there is still no transparent consensus on the age of the oldest artifacts. Moving forward, he said, “This site is surely a vital, vital, vital site. “This helped archaeologists realize that humans began to reach the front continent of the Clovis people.

The excavation itself is on display at the Heinz History Center, allowing you to see an excavation in person.

Cooper Ferry, Idaho

One site that added intriguing evidence to the pre-Clovis theory is in western Idaho. Humans living there left stone equipment and charred bones in a home between 14,000 and 16,000 years old, according to radiocarbon quotes. Other researchers have moved the dates closer to 11,500 years ago.

These rod equipment are another of the projectiles harassed to Clovis, the researchers wrote in a 2019 Journal of Scientific Advances.

Some scientists that humans had possibly traveled along the west coast at that time, when glacial capital letters covered Alaska and Canada. “People who use boats, who use canoes can also jump through this coast and meet in North America long before these glacial bodies are cut,” Feder said.

Cooper’s Ferry is on classic Nez Perce land, which is publicly owned through the Bureau of Land Management.

Page-Ladson, Florida

At the beginning of the 1980s, former Buddy Page Navy Seal Page alerted the paleontologists and archaeologists of a sink called “Booger Hole” in the Aucilla River. Extractors, researchers and bones and mastodonic stone tools.

They also discovered a Mastodon defense with what appeared to have reduced the marks through a tool. Other scientists have returned to the site more recently, lifting more bones and tools. They used radiocarbon dating, which established the site as a pre-Clovis.

“Stone equipment and wildlife remain on display at the site that at 14,550 years ago, other people knew how to locate game, new water, and tool-making materials,” Michael Waters, one of the researchers, said in A in 2016. “These other people were well adapted to this environment. “

Since it is underwater and on personal property, it is not open to visitors.

Cuevas de Paisley, Oregon

Scientists examine coprolitos, or fossilized peanut, to be informed more about Deadstock’s long -term diets. Mineralized tea can also reveal much more. In 2020, archaeologist Dennis Jenkins published an article on the coprolitas of a cave of Oregon that is over 14,000 years old.

Radiocarbon dating has given the lines of fossils, and genetic tests reported that they belonged to man. Further investigation of the coprolites added more evidence that an organization on the west coast 1,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people.

Located in the center of Oregon-South, the caves seem to be a piece of the puzzle that indicates how humans have the continent thousands of years ago.

The Federal Bureau of Land Management owns the land where the caves are located, and they are signed at the beginning of historic sites.

Swan Point, Alaska

Each time other people arrived in the Americas, they crossed from Siberia to Beringia, a land and sea domain between Russia and Canada and Alaska. Now it is covered with water, but once there is a land bridge that connects them.

The in Alaska with the oldest evidence of human housing is Swan Point, in the region of the central-east of the State. In addition to the 14,000 -year -old teams and homes, gigantic bones were discovered there.

Researchers that this domain was a type of seasonal hunting camp. As the mammoths returned for safe periods of the years, humans would adhere to them and kill them, offering abundant food for hunters-gatherers.

Although Alaska can have a richness of archaeological evidence of the first Americans, it is also a difficult position to dig. “His excavation season is very close and expensive,” Feder said. Some require a helicopter to achieve, for example.

Blackwater Draw, New Mexico

In 1929, James Ridgley, 1929, 1929, discovered gigantic bones with striated projectile problems near Clovis, in New Mexico. The other Clovis people who made these teams were named for this site.

Researchers examining the site began to realize that the artifacts discovered at the site belonged to other cultures. Clovis’ problems are bigger than Folsom’s flutes, which were first discovered at another New Mexico archaeological site.

For decades after Whiteman’s discovery, the idea of ​​the mavens that the other people of Clovis were the first to cross the Bering d’Aring land bridge about 13,000 years ago. It is believed that the estimates of the arrival of humans are now at least 15,000 years ago.

The University of New Mexico Blackwater drew the Museum of Eastern New Mexico, awarded to the archaeological site between April and October.

Haute Sun River, Alaska

One of the reasons why the dates of human profession in North America are so debatable is that very few ancient remains have been found. The oldest is a child from the Sun River upwards, or xaasaa na’, in central Alaska.

Archaeologists discovered the boy’s bones in 2013. Local indigenous teams call it xach’itee’anenh t’eède gay, or girl’s genetic tests.

Based on the child’s genetic information, the researchers learned that he was connected to fashion asleans, but not directly. His non -unusual ancestors began to remarry genetically 25,000 years before dividing into two teams after a few thousand years: the ancient Berignians and the ancestors of the fashionable Americans.

According to this research, it is imaginable that humans arrived in Alaska about 20,000 years ago.

National Poverty Monument, Louisiana

Extending more than 80 feet long and five feet high, rows of curved poverty are wonderful when it shows from above. More than 3,000 years ago, the hunters-gatherers built them in tons of land. Scientists do not know precisely why other people have built them, whether ceremonial or a state demonstration.

The artifacts that the equipment left implies that the site has been used and for many years and was an assembly point for trade. People have brought equipment and rocks at 800 miles away. The remains of deer, fish, frogs, caimanes, nuts, grapes and other foods have given archaeologists a review of their nutrition and daily life.

You can see the World Heritage site through yourself all year round.

Horseshoe Canyon, Utah

Although it rises, the multicolored walls of the Horseshoe canyon have attracted visitors for a long time. Some of its artifacts return between 9,000 and 7,000 a. C. , but its pictograms are more recent. Some tests date from safe sections of around 2,000 to 900 years.

The 4 galleries involve life-size photographs of anthropomorphic figures and animals in what is known as the canyon barrier style. Much of this art is discovered in Utah, produced through the archaic desert culture.

Pictograms can have a non -secular and practical meaning, but also capture a time when the teams gathered and mixed, according to the Utah Natural History Museum.

It’s a tricky hike to succeed on pictograms (and the NPS warns it can be dangerously hot in summer) but it’s seeing in person, Feder said. “These are artistic geniuses,” he said of the artists.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

Located in the Navajo nation, Canyon de Chelly has magnificent perspective perspectives and thousands of years of human history. He does the centers, the ancestral teams of Pueblo and Hopi plant crops, created pictographs and built housing in cliffs.

More than 900 years ago, the other town of Puebloan built the White House, which bears the name of the shadow of their clay. Its upper floors are sitting in a sandstone cliff, with a transparent fall of the windows.

The other people of Navajo, also known as Diné, still live in Canyon de Chelly. Diné Alastair journalist Lee Bitsóí recently wrote about some of the sacred and taboo areas. They come with Tsé Yaa Kin, where archaeologists have discovered human remains.

In the 1860s, the United States government forced 8,000 Navajo to move to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Fatal adventure is known as the “long walk. ” Finally, they were able to return, their houses and their cultures were destroyed.

A White House walk is one that is open to the public without a Navajo consultant or NPS Ranger.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

In early 1900, two shaped the Leling Association of Coliff Coliff, hoping to maintain the ruins in the state region of the Southwest. A few years later, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an invoice that designates the Green Mesa as the first national park aimed at “maintaining the works of man. “

The Mesa Verde National Park has a large number of homes, adding the Palais de Falaises. It has more than one hundred rooms and approximately two dozen kivas or ceremonial areas.

With the help of dendrocronology or trees dating, archaeologists learned when the ancestral people built some of those structures and that emigrated outside the doors of the region through the years 1300.

Feder said it was his favorite archaeological site that he visited. “You don’t need to leave because you can’t be real,” he said.

Tourists can see many of those housing on the road, but some are also available after a walk. Some want more tickets and can congested, Feder said.

Cahokia, Illinois

Cahokia called one of the first cities in North America. Not far from St. Louis existing, around 10,000 to 20,000 people lived in dense colonies about 1,000 years ago. The important buildings were sitting on the most sensible giant mounds, which the Mississippiens built by hand, The Guardian reported.

At that time, he is booming with hunters, farmers and artisans. “It’s an agricultural civilization,” Feder said. It is a position in which raw fabrics arrive at thousands of miles away. “Researchers have also discovered non -unusual tombs, potentially from human sacrifice.

The population built posts of posts, which an archaeologist called “Woodhenges”, as a type of calendar. In the solstices, the sun rises or lies aligned with other mounds.

After a few hundred years, the population of Cahakia decreased and disappeared by 1350. Its largest mound remains, and the safe facets were rebuilt.

Although Cahokia is open to the public, the portions are recently closed for renovations.

Montezuma Castle, Arizona

Presented in a limestone cliff in Camp Verde, Arizona, this is an apartment, not a castle, and is not connected to Sovereign Aztec Montezuma.

The other people of Sinagua have designed the construction of five stories and 20 rooms around 1100. It curves to adhere to the herbal line of the cliff, which would have been more complicated than simply doing a correct construction, Feder said.

“These other people were architects,” he said. “They had a feeling of beauty. “

The population was also practical, discovering irrigation systems and structure techniques, such as thick walls and shaded spots, to help them in the warm and dry climate.

Feder said that the accommodation is quite accessible, with a short walk along a path to see it, visitors cannot enter the construction itself.

Read the Business Insider article

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