Ancestors of the first Americans!

[elektro80]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A people who may have been ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, enduring one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age, according to researchers who discovered the oldest evidence yet of humans living near the frigid gateway to the New World.


Russian scientists uncovered a 30,000-year-old site where ancient hunters lived on the Yana River in Siberia, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering land bridge that then connected Asia with North America.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/01/01/iceage.hunters.ap/index.html

Donald K. Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said the discovery is very significant because it is so much earlier than any other proven evidence of people living in the frigid lands of Siberia that formed the gateway to the Americas.


"Until this site was reported, the earliest site in Bering land bridge area was dated at about 11,000 years ago," said Grayson. "Every other site that had been thought to have been early enough to have something to do with peopling of the New World has been shown not to be so."

There was no physical barrier to going to the Americas from Asia during that period. The Bering land bridge connected the two continents until about 11,000 years ago, when a rising sea level flooded the connection and created what is now called the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.


"Getting people across to the New World was not the problem," said Grayson. "The problem was getting people into that part of the world so they could cross."

[elektro80]

There was some controversy approx. 20 years ago re some objects thought to be musical instruments. I seem to remember they were first dated to about 12000 years ago.

Anyone knows more about this? Which is the oldest known musical instruments?