University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins (center) handed up a device to a co-worker for measuring temperature at the Paisley Caves outside Paisley, Ore. (Jeff Barnard/ Associated Press)
By Jeff Barnard Associated Press
PAISLEY, Ore. - For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters, and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, 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.
Until now, they have found nothing conclusive - arrowheads, baskets, animal bones, and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake, but is now a sage brush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin.
But a few years ago, University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his students started digging where no one had dug before. What the team discovered in an alcove used as a latrine and trash dump has elevated the caves to the site of the oldest radiocarbon dated human remains in North America.
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Monday, September 22, 2008