A super-ancient settlement has recently been unearthed in Canada.
The age of the settlement? Fourteen thousand years old.
Let’s put that into perspective for a moment. A settlement that existed circa 12,000 B.C. would clearly lie within the Paleolithic period when ice covered Europe and man lived his nomadic existence of hunting and gathering. The Canadian settlement would have sprung up not long after the creation of cave paintings at Lascaux, France, and around the same time that the Altamira caves were painted in Spain. It would have pre-dated some of the most ancient-known civilizations at Jericho and Çatal Höyük by several thousand years.
The location of the site, which was found by a doctoral student, is on Triquet Island on the coast of British Columbia. A video on a news site showed what appeared to be some of the items found, which were small tools or weapon parts. The story states that this is the oldest North American settlement ever found.
This is pretty amazing. While Paleolithic people left several fascinating works of art in sites across Europe, I am unfamiliar with any found in North America. Could this find bring about a more intense search for prehistoric North American settlements? It would be quite interesting to me if North America ever had its own version of the Venus of Willendorf.
