CANCELLED

This meeting is cancelled. Although the main roads look good, the museum parking lot is icy and though it may partially melt today, it will refreeze this evening.  The next meeting will be Tuesday, April 1st, when we will hear about the recent and upcoming work at Spiro Mounds.

The OAS Cleveland County chapter will be having its next meeting on Tuesday, March 4th, at 7pm at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. All are welcome!

Ancient American DNA

Major archaeology news!  A team of researchers have sequenced DNA from a young boy from the Clovis era (~12,000 years ago).  The major result: genetically, most contemporary American Indians are directly related to the Clovis people.

Ancient DNA Ties Native Americans from Two Continents to Clovis (Richard Harris, NPR, 13 February 2014)

Here is a link to the original article: The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana (Rasmussen et al. 2014) 

The remains, which were found on private land, were not subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).  The researchers have consulted with local tribes in Montana, though, and a reburial is planned for later this spring.

Ancient Genome Stirs Ethics Debate (Ewen Calloway, Nature, 12 February 2014)

To learn more about the Clovis culture, check out the Center for the Studies of the First Americans at Texas A&M and the Wikipedia article.

Clovis point (In the workplace) Example of a Clovis fluted blade that is 11,000 years old Image courtesy of the Virginia Dept. of Historic Resources.