(ORDO NEWS) — An ancient village dating back to pre-Pyramid times has been discovered by a team of Canadian doctoral students.
According to CTV, a group of archeology students at the University of Victoria have discovered the oldest settlement in North America.
The ancient settlement was discovered during a search on Tricket Island, an island located about 300 kilometers north of Victoria, British Columbia.
The team found ancient fishing hooks and spears, as well as tools for making fires.
However, they hit the real jackpot when they found an ancient cooking hearth from which they were able to extract flakes of charcoal burned by prehistoric Canadians.
Using carbon dating of charcoal, the researchers were able to determine that the settlement originated 14,000 years ago, which makes it significantly older than the pyramids of ancient Egypt, which Egyptologists believe were built about 4,700 years ago.
To understand how ancient this settlement really is, you need to consider that the ancient ruler of Egypt, Cleopatra, lived closer in time to you than to the creation of the pyramids.
Even for what we consider to be ancient people, the Egyptian pyramids were quite old.
The newly discovered settlement is more than three times older than the pyramids.
Alisha Govro, a doctoral student who helped discover the site, says: “I remember we got the dates and we just sat there and said, ‘Oh my God, this is very ancient.’
She and her team began researching the area for ancient settlements after hearing an oral history from the Heiltsuk indigenous people about a piece of land that never froze during the last ice age.
William Houstie, a member of the original Heiltsuk people, said: “Just to think how these stories survived and were confirmed by these archaeological data is simply amazing.”
“This find is very important because it confirms a lot of the story that our people have been talking about for thousands of years.”
Researchers believe that this settlement is evidence of a mass migration of people along the coast of British Columbia.
“It changes our understanding of how the settlement of North America happened,” says Govreau.
The students hope to continue searching the nearby islands for more evidence of this migration.
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