May 2017

The road to 5 Mile Point and the Paisley Caves, Lake County Oregon.NRHP Reference #14000708 It is as true in the Northern Great Basin as it is with anywhere else on the planet. Art marks our progress across the world. As we expanded out of Africa more than 55,000 years ago and spread across the globe we left our mark in each new landscape we encountered. The Paisley Caves in Lake County, Oregon yield the oldest dates of human occupation in the Americas. The caves figure large in the history of the Great Basin. Digs have been going on there since the 1930s under the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Recently, archaeologist Dennis Jenkins has found human coprolites dating to 14,300 years ago. There are charred camel bones that are 700 years older but they were excavated in the 1930s and Jenkins just doesn’t have the documentation to...