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Saturday, April 5, 2014

Dr. Dennis Jenkins Interview! (4/4/14)

World Solutrean Month kicks off with yet another trailblazer in the world of archaeology! TRP is proud to welcome Dr. Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon!

Dennis L. Jenkins is a research archaeologist, field school supervisor for the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology/Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, and director of the
university's Northern Great Basin Field School. His archaeological experience spans some 35 years with more than 100 excavations! His remarkable finds have led to a new accepted date for earliest human settlement in the Americas.

Dr. Jenkins has found "actual human remains" that pre-date the Clovis Beringians by over one thousand years! Ancient human coprolites (dried feces) directly radiocarbon dated to 14,500 years ago have been recovered from Pleistocene aged deposits containing artifacts and extinct megafaunal remains in the Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves in south central Oregon. Their human origins verified by the extraction of ancient DNA, these are currently the oldest directly dated human remains in the Western Hemisphere. This very unique site has many kinds of perishable and nonperishable items preserved there. The evidence indicates the first site occupants were broad-range hunter-gathers well adapted to the Northern Great Basin’s high desert environment of the late Pleistocene.

His publications include “Oregon Archaeology” (Oregon State University Press, 2011), Early and Middle Holocene Archaeology of the Northern Great Basin (University of Oregon Anthropological Papers 62, 2004), and Archaeological Researches in the Northern Great Basin: Fort Rock Archaeology Since Cressman (University of Oregon Anthropological Papers 50, 1994) co-authored with C. M. Aikens and T. J. Connolly.



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