SEQUIM — There were people inhabiting Happy Valley, south of Sequim, 13,800 years ago, some 800 years before the Clovis people, long thought to be the first humans to populate North America.
Those were the history-changing findings released Thursday in an article published in the journal Science.
Newer technologies of carbon dating and DNA testing were used to reanalyze a bone fragment found buried in a mastodon rib unearthed from farmland owned by Emanual and Clare Manis.
Washington State University’s Carl Gustafson — who led the archaeology team that dug up the mastodon bones after “Manny” Manis hit the tusks of the relic in August 1977 while he was using a backhoe to dig a pond — suggested at the time that the bone fragment was from the tip of a weapon used to kill the animal.
But other archaeologists were not convinced then.
Gustafson and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, said in the Science article that the bone fragment was indeed the tip of a spear — and that the people who used that spear pre-dated the oldest known Americans.
The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting mastodons, an elephant-like woolly animal standing 8 feet to 9 feet tall at the shoulder, long before Clovis.
“Recent studies have strengthened the case that the makers of Clovis projectile points were not the first people to occupy the Americas,” the Science article concludes.
The Manis inhabitants were believe to have migrated to North America from northeastern and central Asia, much like the Clovis people, crossing the Bering land bridge through present-day Alaska.
The state’s first registered National Historic Place near the end of Lester Way in Happy Valley is today filled in and grassed over where an archaeological dig took place from 1977 to 1985.
For Clare Manis Hatler, who still lives on the site where her husband built a monument marking what is today pasture land, it is vindication for the archaeologist who led the dig team that uncovered the mastodon under the field — Washington State University’s Carl Gustafson.
“I’m so glad for Dr. Gustafson because he had all the proof in his hands, and these Clovis people were just challenging it all the time,” said Manis Hatler, who is now remarried after Manny Manis died in 2000.
Gustafson, contacted Thursday in Pullman, was equally excited and happy to be right — and recognized for it after 30 years.
“The techniques weren’t available in the ’70s or ’80s, so when Mike called, I was tickled pink,” Gustafson, retired from WSU since 1998, said of Waters, who contacted him about three years ago, offering to use new technology to draw final conclusions.
Besides DNA testing, they used CT scanning to get a close-up view of the embedded bone point.
That helped them conclude the point was 10 inches long and had been sharpened, said Gustafson, who dug on the Manis site from 1977 to 1985, taking a year off in 1984.
They found the ancient “projectile” point was more than 10 inches long and had been sharpened.
Gustafson said he left the site knowing full well then what he had found.
“At that time, my conclusion was I thought there couldn’t be any other way, that this was human-caused,” he said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
