In a quiet corner of South Carolina, an archaeologist kept digging when everyone told him to stop. 👀 🪏 The site — known as Topper — was already rich with Clovis tools and flint points dating back 13,000 years. 🌎 But beneath the known history… he found more. A layer of barren soil... 🌱 And below that — artifacts dating back more than 50,000 years. It’s one of the most controversial discoveries in North American archaeology. If these findings are real, they rewrite when — and how — humans firs

Archaeology shows the Clovis culture vanishing at the Younger Dryas boundary...and they weren’t alone. Around the world, sites show long periods of habitation followed by sudden silence. The common assumption is migration. But what if many of these cultures didn’t relocate at all? The evidence may point instead to abrupt, catastrophic loss...entire populations wiped out rather than moving on. | The Randall Carlson

The sudden catastrophic change at 12,800 years ago wiped out the Clovis culture that had existed for 300 to 500 years. Simultaneous with the mammoths. Studies now show a continental-wide human population crash coincident with megafaunal extinctions. Quarries mined for centuries suddenly abandoned. Campsites with generations of debris and toolkits... suddenly abandoned. The evidence suggests the human population crashed alongside the megafauna. | The Randall Carlson