New research may have answered a long-standing mystery by pinning a rough date on the earliest known humans in Canada's oilsands region.
In a recently published paper, professor Robin Woywitka of Edmonton's MacEwan University says a combination of archeology and geology has revealed that people were living around Fort McMurray, Alta., at least 11,000 years ago and perhaps as long ago as 13,000 years ago.“Fort McMurray has been a nexus for millennia. It's attracted people forever.”
Sometimes, scientists can use sedimentary layers in the earth to date artifacts. But this area has been so stable that there aren't many places where sediment has been deposited.They took satellite maps that revealed the surface topography with an accuracy to within a few square metres. They used that information to find sites where sedimentation was most likely to have happened and selected five of them - one of them in the Quarry of the Ancestors.
The findings put those early people right at the start of when that part of the world became livable. The first inhabitants would have moved there within a few centuries after the catastrophic flood that drained glacial Lake Agassiz, a vast inland sea that once covered almost all of what is now Manitoba and half of present-day Ontario.
They would have found a landscape very far from the lush boreal forests and teeming wetlands that now cover much of northern Alberta.
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