Canadian village 10,000 years older than the Pyramids

For hundreds (maybe thousands) of years, generations of the Heiltsuk Nation, an indigenous group in British Columbia, have passed down the oral histories of where they came from.

The Nation claims that its ancestors migrated to a coastal region in Canada that never froze in the Ice Age.

According to local news agency CBC, a new excavation on Triquet Island on British Columbia’s Central Coast has now backed up the claim.

The archaeologist Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student from Victoria University, and a student from the Hakai Research Institute, led the site excavation team at the end of 2016.

They discovered several artifacts from what appears to be an ancient village, including carved wooden tools and bits of charcoal, in a thin horizontal layer of soil, called paleosol.

The team then sent the charcoal flakes to a lab for carbon dating, and found that the pieces date back approximately between 13,613 to 14,086 years ago, thousands of years before Egypt built its pyramids.

The artifacts are some of the oldest found in North America. In 1977, Washington State University archaeologists excavated a spear tip and mastodon rib bone (an extinct species related to elephants) near Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

After CT scans in 2011, the fossils pushed estimates of the earliest human habitation on the West Coast back by 800 years (to about 13,800 years before present day). Read the free article.