Many of us know who lived in our homes in years past. Perhaps we even realize the history of the land going back a century or so, and know who lived there, what they did, and what sorts of activities took place there. But what about before that?
It’s easy to forget that this land has been inhabited for centuries, long before Christopher Columbus and the Vikings first set foot in the Americas. Who were these people that were here before? Simply put, there is no single answer to that question.
Native Americans had a wide diversity of cultures and customs, and a history that can rival anything found in prehistoric Europe or anywhere else in the world.
Mound building cultures dominated the Upper Ohio Valley just two thousand years ago, but even they can be considered modern when we take the first Americans into account. It is hard to pinpoint when humans first set foot in the Americas. Until recently, it was thought that the Clovis people were the earliest people to call this hemisphere home.
The Clovis people can be identified by a specific type of spear point, first identified in Clovis, New Mexico in the 1930s. This archaeological site was thrilling for scientists, as the spear points were found in association with a mammoth. This relationship proved this was a site of great age. We would later learn that Clovis spear points, and the Clovis people, were here in North America as early as 13 thousand years ago.
The Clovis people were a hunter-gatherer culture, hunting megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons. These were not a people that lived in villages and settlements but were constantly on the move. Little evidence of them remains beyond their unique spear points and a few other types of stone tools.
In recent decades, new discoveries have shown that there may have been people here before the Clovis people. Sites such as Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in nearby Washington County show human habitation as far back as 19 thousand years ago.
It is hard to say if we will ever know just how long ago humans first discovered the Americas, but one thing is for sure – it was much longer ago than most of us realize.
Shown here is a Clovis spear point typical of ones found throughout North and South America. These points are unique in their shape and the fluting up the base. The fluting is a thinning of the middle area, allowing it to more easily be attached to the end of a Spear. Though rare, many Clovis spear points have been found in Greene County.
