* Astronomy

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RE: First Americans

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Earliest human remains in US Arctic reported

Some 11,500 years ago one of America's earliest families laid the remains of a 3-year-old child to rest in their home in what is now Alaska. The discovery of that burial is shedding new light on the life and times of the early settlers who crossed from Asia to the New World, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

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It's a typical day at the Hatteras Histories and Mysteries Museum in Buxton, N.C., and Scott Dawson is buzzing around glass cases full of centuries-old arrowheads and broken pottery. Puzzled visitors listen as he explains for the gazillionth time the difference between fact and speculation. He speaks with certainty in a voice tinged with more than a hint of frustration. "Anybody who researches it knows that the colony came down here," he says, confidently dismissing competing theories on America's oldest unsolved mystery. The artifacts, many unearthed during archaeological digs in the past year, may hold the clues that finally answer the question: What happened to the Lost Colony, a group of 117 Englishmen who settled on a tiny island off the North Carolina coast and then vanished with barely a trace?
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Prehistoric artifacts in North Port spring

In the pitch-black depths of an isolated North Port spring sits a silt-covered ledge that is revealing secrets about a prehistoric nomadic people, secrets held in murky silence for 100 centuries.
Now, with diving gear and artifact-collecting bags, archaeologists with the University of Miami and The Florida Aquarium are sweeping away the muck and uncovering that distant past.
This stuff could be as old as 13,000 years old, when wandering tribes traversed Florida. Their travels included stopovers at what is now known as Little Salt Spring, 90 minutes south of Tampa.
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Ancient woman suggests diverse migration

A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say.
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released photos of the reconstructed image of a woman who probably lived on Mexico's Caribbean coast 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. She peeks out of the picture as a short, spry-looking woman with slightly graying hair.
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CU Researcher Finds 10,000-Year-Old Hunting Weapon in Melting Ice Patch

To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee's recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm.
Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National Park.
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10,000-Year-Old Hunting Weapon

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Thousands of years before Euro-Americans "discovered" the bubbling mudpots and eruptive geysers of what is now Yellowstone National Park, early Americans were spending part of their summer camping in the Yellowstone Lake area.
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Prehistoric carving may be Americas oldest artwork

A small carving of a mastodon, a prehistoric cousin of the elephant, found on a piece of mammal bone among an amateur collector's pile of fossils in Vera Beach, Florida, might be thousands of years older than Stonehenge in England and the pyramids in Egypt, says a team of scientists at the University of Florida. It also would offer rare tangible evidence that humans lived in Florida, America, during the last Ice Age, alongside now-extinct mammals such as the mastodon, mammoth and sabre-tooth cat.
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Scientists urge full-scale excavation of 'Vero Man' archaeological site

For four scientists from Florida and Colorado, there is no question about the need for a full-scale excavation into the city's Ice Age archaeology, they said Thursday.
The city is one of a few places in the United States where human skeletal remains apparently have been found with bones of now extinct animals - indicating they lived together here from 11,000 to 13,000 years ago, archaeological researcher Tom Stafford of Colorado said during a press conference at the Emerson Centre.
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