Folsom Site Excavation Confirms Ice Age Human Presence in the Americas

In 1926, paleontologists from the Colorado Museum of Natural History excavated a site near Folsom, New Mexico, where ranch foreman George McJunkin had found large bison bones in 1908. McJunkin, a formerly enslaved man and self-taught naturalist, recognized the bones as belonging to an extinct species. The excavation uncovered fluted projectile points embedded among bones of Bison antiquus, a species extinct since the late Pleistocene. This provided the first widely accepted evidence that humans inhabited North America during the last Ice Age.