The Western North American Pre-Clovis Complex

The Manis site does not stand alone in the Pacific Northwest and western North America.

It is part of a growing body of evidence that is reshaping understanding of the earliest human occupation of this region — evidence that, taken together, suggests a pre-Clovis human presence that was geographically widespread and temporally established well before the Clovis horizon.

Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho — located along the Salmon River drainage, which ultimately connects to the Columbia River and the Pacific — has produced archaeological evidence dated by AMS radiocarbon methods to approximately 15,000 to 16,000 calibrated years before the present.

The artifacts from Cooper’s Ferry include stone tools that show no resemblance to the Clovis tradition: they are different in form, different in technique, and dated to a period substantially earlier than any Clovis site.