x

New documentary questions timeline of first people in Texas

New documentary questions timeline of first people in Texas
2 months 5 days 7 hours ago Wednesday, October 09 2024 Oct 9, 2024 October 09, 2024 10:54 AM October 09, 2024 in News - Local

A new documentary says people may have lived in Central Texas far longer than was first thought.

Those prehistoric people lived at a place called The Gault Site, and a film about it will premiere during the Austin film Festival.

The feature length film, "The Stones Are Speaking," will debut on Oct. 26, and will show Texans a little known piece of their past.

"If there's such a cool place deep in the heart of Texas, right in our backyard, why don't more Texans know about this?" film producer Olive Talley said.

The Gault Site in Central Texas challenges the traditional theory in archaeology that 13,000 years ago humans walked across a land bridge from modern day Russia to Alaska to be the first humans in North America.

The layers of evidence at the Gault Site challenges that story and pushes the timeline back to 20,000 years.

"What the Gault Site has revealed through bones of turtles, mammoth, horse, rabbit, deer and by the trappings and the leavings of stone tools and remnants of stone tools, what Gault is teaching us is that the people at Gault came and stayed. They were not just running through chasing mammoth," Talley said.

The film follows the efforts of Archaeologist Mike Collins to acquire and preserve the Gault Site.

The Gault stone tools show different patterns of craftsmanship from the Clovis-era tools and were found under deeper layers of soil.

Along the Rio Grande, there were people who made cave paintings just outside modern day Del Rio.

In the Rio Grande Valley, the earliest record of human habitation goes back to 12,000 years, with stone tool evidence, according to University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Anthropology Professor Dr. Russ Skowronek.

Skowronek says the Gault Site is evidence there could be older artifacts lying under our feet.

More information on the film is available online.

More News


Radar
7 Days