A Florida drainage project is exposing evidence that could rewrite the timeline of the first Americans. Workers stumbled upon artifacts buried deep beneath the surface, forcing archaeologists to question when humans truly arrived on the continent.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists working in a Florida sinkhole found stone tools and butchered mastodon bones that appeared to date to roughly 14,400 years ago. That age predated the Clovis culture, long considered the first people in the Americas, by more than a thousand years. The findings were published quietly, and the wider field of archaeology largely ignored them.The site, known…