YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsNews  Artifacts upend theory on
first North Americans  A cache of 15,500-year-old artifacts
found buried in a Texas flood plain predates the well-known
Clovis people, long thought to be the first inhabitants of the
New World.  March 26, 2011|By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles
Times  A massive cache of 15,500-year-old artifacts from a Texas
flood plain is providing what archaeologists are calling the
first unequivocal evidence that the people of the well-known
Clovis culture, long thought to be the first humans to inhabit
North America, were not.  Archaeologists had previously found
several sites, such as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in
Pennsylvania and the Paisley Caves in Oregon, that appeared to
predate the Clovis culture and its distinctive fluted spear
points, but the paucity of artifacts from those sites made such
a conclusion highly controversial.  All of those sites together
produced perhaps 800 artifacts total, but the new Buttermilk
Creek site north of Austin has produ