Farm field find rewrites archaeological history in Michigan

Independent researcher Thomas Talbot finds a flake of manufacturing debris, untouched for 13,000 years, at the Belson Clovis Site in St. Joseph County. Image credit: Michigan Photography Thirteen thousand years ago, most of Michigan was covered in a wall of ice up to a mile high. Archaeologists believed this kept some of the continent's earliest people, a group called Clovis after their distinctive spear points, from settling in the region. But an independent researcher along with University of Michigan researchers have identified a 13,000-year-old Clovis camp site, now thought to be the earliest archaeological site in Michigan. The site predates previously identified human settlements in the Michigan basin and potentially rewrites the history of the peopling-or settling-of the Great Lakes region. The site was likely occupied by a small group of people, about six or seven, who briefly lived on a river in southwest Michigan toward the end of the Pleistocene. The finding also suggests this is the northwestern-most Clovis settlement in the Great Lakes region.