ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 21, 1997 TAG: 9702210074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARION
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
FINDING THE OLDEST HUMAN HABITATION in North America isn't a contest, but it's exciting to know Saltville was occupied 14,000 years ago.
Reconstructed dinosaurs may look impressive, but fossils of tiny prehistoric life forms tell researchers more about their planet's past, according to the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.
"This is where the advances in science are. It's not in excavating the huge bones, but the finely detailed study," said Nicholas Fraser, who is also an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.
"Down in Saltville, we have one of the few sites in the world where we are going to start answering these questions of how these animals lived and interacted with one another and, I guess, with humans, too," he said. "There is a tremendous potential there for us to understand an awful lot more."
Fraser spoke to nearly 40 people here this week at a lecture sponsored by the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, now operating in interim quarters in Saltville while planning its permanent structure there.
Nearly a year ago, researcher Jerry McDonald reported objects and features from the Saltville site indicating the presence of human beings in North America 14,000 years ago, nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Dating of these objects showed that early human beings butchered and cooked a mastodon over an open fire on the flood plain of what was then a river, using bone, stone and ivory tools. Some of the tools appear to have been made locally and others brought from distant places.
In September 1995, another archaeologist announced the unearthing in Sussex County of stone tools and remnants of a cooking fire nearly 11,000 years old. The tools appear to be from the Clovis culture, believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to North America 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Remnants of that culture were first found in Virginia some 60 years ago, but this was the first radiocarbon dating of its presence. The Saltville findings would seem to move it back even further.
Before the Saltville findings, the earliest human presence pinpointed in the Western Hemisphere had been in South America, dating back 13,800 years. Earlier this month, an archaeological team near Monte Verde, Chile, announced traces of a human presence as early as 12,500 years ago and possibly as long as 33,000 years ago.
If those findings hold up, it would show not only that human beings lived in the Americas far earlier than previously thought, but also that they ranged farther south from the Bering Strait. That could mean they arrived much earlier than previously projected or came by a different route.
People tend to get caught up in the erroneous idea that there is a kind of archaeological contest for the oldest human site, said Carol Boone, program administrator for the Saltville museum. McDonald had said early in his discussion of the Saltville findings that older sites were likely to be found, because Saltville was obviously not the first place these wanderers from across the sea would have stopped.
Fraser said Virginia has been thrust into the scientific spotlight by fossil finds not only at Saltville but also at the Solite Quarry near the Virginia-North Carolina border and the Caroline Quarry near the coast.
"Fossils are a very, very rare phenomenon," he said, because the conditions leading to their preservation seldom happen. The creature must be quickly buried after death in a way that protects it from everything from scavengers to microbes. This requires the presence of a lot of sediment, which is usually associated with water.
Of all the life forms in existence today, he said, "pretty well none of them have a chance of entering into the fossil record. Not a single one."
As for the Saltville area research, he said, "I must say we are by no means finished." He said that site is helping to build a picture of what this little part of Virginia was like some 220 million years ago, and it is the small details that build that big picture.
"You've got to look at it in the right way. That's the key to its success, and it's my suspicion that nobody's looked at it in the right way" over the years since a mastodon tooth from the area was given to Thomas Jefferson, he said. McDonald's returns to the site with research teams in the past decade have changed that, he said.
"People have had the presence of mind to continue to look and to come back and to come back," he said. "We've had the people in the right place at the right time looking with the right technique."
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