Response to Review of “Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ∼16,000 years ago” by Fiedel et al.

Abstract

ABSTRACT In an essay published in PaleoAmerica (2020, Vol. 6, No. 4), Fiedel and coauthors present a review of “Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ∼16,000 years ago”, by Davis and coauthors in Science (2019, Vol. 365, pp. 891–897). Fiedel and coauthors’ review presents significant misunderstandings about fundamental aspects of site stratigraphy and radiocarbon chronology and also advances alternative speculations about reported archaeological phenomena generated solely by their imaginations. Worse, Fiedel and coauthors attribute to us things we did not say, then use those false attributions to discredit our work. Our response provides an opportunity to clarify issues of stratigraphy, site formation, chronology, feature interpretation, and paleogenetics. We reinforce our original report that people bearing late Upper Paleolithic lithic technology initially occupied the Cooper’s Ferry site ∼16,000 calendar years ago and later returned over and over to live at the site during Clovis times and afterwards.