DATE: Wednesday, February 26, 1997          TAG: 9702260509

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: MARION                            LENGTH:   39 lines

TINY FOSSILS TELL MORE THAN DINOSAURS ABOUT PAST, RESEARCHER SAYS

Reconstructed dinosaurs may look impressive, but some researchers contend that fossils of tiny prehistoric life forms tell more about the planet's past.

Nearly a year ago, researcher Jerry McDonald reported objects and features from a site around Saltville in Smyth and Washington counties indicating the presence of human beings in North America 14,000 years ago - nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.

``This is where the advances in science are. It's not in excavating the huge bones, but the finely detailed study,'' said Nicholas Fraser, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

Dating these objects showed that early human beings butchered and cooked a mastodon over an open fire on the flood plain of what was then a river, using bone, stone and ivory tools.

Some of the tools appear to have been made locally and others brought from distant places.

In September 1995, another archaeologist announced the unearthing in Sussex County of stone tools and remnants of a cooking fire nearly 11,000 years old.

The tools appear to be from the Clovis culture, believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to North America nearly 13,000 years ago.

Remnants of that culture were first found in Virginia 60 years ago, but this was the first radiocarbon dating of its presence. The Saltville area findings would move it back even further.

Before the findings, the earliest human presence pinpointed in the Western Hemisphere had been in South America, dating back 13,800 years.

People tend to get caught up in the erroneous idea that there is a contest for the oldest human site, said Carol Boone, program administrator for the Saltville museum.

Fraser said Virginia has been thrust into the scientific spotlight by fossil finds not only at Saltville but also at the Solite Quarry near the Virginia-North Carolina border and the Caroline Quarry near the coast.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu