What is truly spectacular about the discovery is that it illuminates a prehistoric time when wooly mammoths roamed North America alongside our human ancestors.
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Traces of the food they used to eat, including bison, deer, bear, sheep and salmon have been revealed in the chemical analysis of one of the tools.
As industry workers are now working on a salmon conservation site near the area, a dig of about 16 acres, the archaeologists announced that among the 4,000 stone tools they have also found a bone fragment from a salmon. The home of the new Redmond Town Center mall had to be resurveyed in accordance with Washington’s efforts to restore salmon habitation along the tributaries of the Sammamish River.
“This was a very good place to have a camp”, authors of the study said. One of the interesting finds is the construction details of the bottom of two spear points.
“Bear Creek in Redmond, Washington, is the only well-stratified, excavated site in the western Washington Puget Lowland to yield in situ lithic artifacts in deposits from the late Pleistocene-Holocene (LPH) transition”, researchers wrote in the journal PaleoAmerica. Also, there are only a handful of these sites that are traced back to 10,000 years or older that have been uncovered in the state. The shores located around creek were most probably occupied by small groups of people.
A stone tool discovered in desert badlands near Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya, is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by MPK-WTAP. Kopperl will talk about the stone tools on Saturday at the Redmond Historical Society.
Robert Kopperl, archaeologist and environmental consultant at Soil and Water Conservation Assistance, said that he and his team were pretty amazed by their findings. Below this peat layer, another wealth of tools and fragments were discovered later.
At first crews discovered just some artifacts that were unremarkable, but when they went deeper, they found a layer of peat that was a foot thick, which was the remains of a 10,000-year-old bog. A place they described as centralized making it easy to hunt, fish, and gather and make new tools from stone.
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Additionally, Kopper and his team will hand the stone tools to the Muckleshoot Tribe, which is a federally recognized Indian tribe, for curation. Although the construction at the site has been completed, signs explaining the archaeological significance of the site will be added later.
