The Folsom find
A spear point between the ribs of an extinct bison
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Folsom is a site in New Mexico where, in 1926, the bones of an extinct bison species were excavated together with tools made by people. Until Folsom it was scholarly orthodoxy that people had reached the Americas only a few thousand years ago, and researchers who argued otherwise were marginalised. The find was decisive because the association was undeniable — the point was in the animal, not merely in the same layer. It was George McJunkin, a formerly enslaved cowboy, who first noticed the bones in an eroded creek bank.
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In 1926 a spear point was found lodged between the ribs of a bison species extinct for ten thousand years. It settled an old argument: people had lived in the Americas far longer than most researchers believed.
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