ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 12, 1996 TAG: 9604120074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
UNTIL NOW, the oldest evidence of human life in the Western Hemisphere was said to be in South America. Saltville may change that.
The earliest evidence of human life in the Western Hemisphere, dating back 14,000 years, may have been found in Saltville, on the border of Smyth and Washington counties in Southwest Virginia.
Jerry McDonald, leader of a paleontological and archaeological research team for the Virginia Museum of Natural History, announced the discovery Thursday in a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Charlotte, N.C.
Until now, South America claimed the oldest finds attributable to human beings in this hemisphere, going back 13,800 years.
In his paper, "Paleo-Indians at Saltville, Va.: The Environment and Ecology of the Earliest Humans in America," McDonald said archaeological evidence shows that humans killed and cooked a mastodon at what today is a research site in Saltville. Tools of local stone and bone were used to butcher the animal and prepare it for cooking over open fires on the Saltville flood plain.
Mastodon tusks were used to make ivory tools, he said. Stones and bones were arranged ritualistically throughout the site.
This site, designated SV-2, was part of the flood plain of a dying river 14,000 years ago, he said. Nearby hills were covered by woodlands, while near-glacial conditions existed at higher elevations. The region's mammal community included ground sloths, mastodons, horses, mammoths, musk oxen, caribou and moose, he said, as well as humans.
Evidence at the site indicates that humans also consumed freshwater clams, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and other mammals living near the river.
It shows that the Paleo-Indian diet was diverse, including a variety of small animals and probably plant materials, McDonald said. It also shows that tools were used and discarded, and that multiple human activities took place at the site.
The floor of the Saltville valley has a flat mud layer, which is why so many artifacts and fossils have been preserved and not washed away.
The place has been of interest to archaeologists at least since 1782, when Arthur Campbell sent a mastodon tooth uncovered there to Thomas Jefferson. Campbell also undertook the area's first commercial development in salt, which had been a staple for ice age mammals as well as humans.
Smithsonian Institution researchers visited the area in 1964, when construction equipment unearthed fossilized remains of prehistoric plant and animal life. In 1980, town employee Charlie Bill Totten found bones of what proved to be an ice age musk ox, the second-most complete skeleton of its kind ever found.
Other excavations followed. McDonald visited Saltville in 1980 when he was on the Radford University faculty, planning to spend maybe an hour looking around. Soon, he was leading Radford students and other volunteers to the area each summer to sift through layers of soil in search of fossils, tools and other evidence of early habitation.
By the 1990s, when he had become president of McDonald & Woodward Publishing Co. in Blacksburg, he was continuing to organize summer digs on behalf of the Virginia Museum of Natural History. He also is associated with plans to establish the regional Museum of the Regional Appalachians at Saltville, where many of the archaeological finds would be displayed.
Early finds included a tooth from a black bear, estimated at 12,000 to 13,000 years old and the first confirmation of carnivores here that long ago.
Subsequent diggers found tracks of a giant ground sloth, a furred plant-eater weighing 1 to 2 tons, preserved in rock. The only others in the United States were uncovered in Nevada shortly before the turn of the century.
McDonald's publishing company is now located in Fort Pierce, Fla. He will take a leave of absence from it this summer to resume work at the Saltville site.
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/1995. Jerry McDonald is leader of a paleontologicalby CNBand archaeological research team for the Virginia Museum of Natural
History. color. Graphic: Map by staff. color.