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But not all experts are convinced. David Meltzer, professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University, said the study clearly showed western stemmed projectiles existed at the same time as Clovis. And he said it put to rest any doubts about whether earlier findings of human DNA at Paisley Caves were contaminated by contact with the modern people excavating the site. But he was not ready to say that the stone points showed separate ancient migrations of people through the continent. "Points are not people," he said. "Just because two ways of fashioning projectile points are different doesn't mean different populations any more than different groups of people drive Hummers rather than Priuses." Jenkins and others reported in 2008 that they found coprolites in the Paisley Caves that dated back 14,300 years, the oldest radio-carbon-dated human DNA in North America. The DNA was genetically linked to people from Asia as well as modern Indians. The caves are a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate near the town of Paisley, Ore. The caves have been excavated since the 1930s by archaeologists and looted by artifact hunters. Jenkins and his team went back the past three summers and dug more, this time outfitted in the special suits, respirators and rubber gloves used by high-tech factory workers to assure they did not contaminate anything. They confirmed the dates through radio-carbon dating of the coprolites, bones and plants and through their placement in the layers of dirt built up over the millennia.
[Associated
Press;
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