There’s a story in my head of someone who travels deep into the bowels of the main branch New York Public Library and finds a window that opens up to when the first Homo sapiens ventured onto Manhattan island and discovered 5th and 42nd (or there about).
Finding out this date was not as easy as I thought. It seems nobody is really that sure when humans reached the Americas nor how they did it. So now I’m curious. What are the oldest human fossils ever found on Manhattan?
Well, Wikipedia says that the area was settled around 7000 BCE, abandoned, settled again around 1000 BCE, and remained so until the Europeans arrived. The Wiki article doesn’t offer any cites for this, though.
No very old human fossils have ever been found in Manhattan. Manhattan was glaciated until about 8,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, so that’s an upper limit for human habitation. (This would appear to contradict the Wiki article cited above, which says 9,000 years ago. This seems to early to me for permanent habitation, based on post-Pleistocene conditions. There would have been little vegetation immediately post melt-off.)
It is possible that some human remains may have been associated with more recent archeological sites, but I haven’t heard of anything. Manhattan archeological sites, to the best of my knowledge, would mainly have consisted of shell mounds and perhaps some tools.
The conventional wisdom for a long time was that the Clovis culture (circa 9,500 BC) was the first to arrive in the Americas, but many archeologists these days accept dates as old as 15,000 years ago or more.
Ah, thanks!
Good thing I checked because I was thinking of going back 10,000 years and there’d be the bottom of a glacier out the library window.