About 8,200 years ago, the worst of the Ice Age was over.
In some parts of the planet, hunting and gathering were beginning to give way to agriculture, as the Pleistocene Epoch slipped into the Holocene.
Southwestern Pueblo cultures had yet to emerge, and Stonehenge was still just a twinkle in some prehistoric forebear's eye. But people were already occupying the sites of several of the oldest cities in the world — the precursors of Jericho on the West Bank, Damascus in Syria.
And at a now-windswept spot in Southern New Mexico, somebody was using a hearth.
A number of somebodies, actually, on potentially a whole series of hearths.
An uncommonly well-preserved campsite believed to date back more than eight millennia has been found deep in the ground on Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo. The site — where geomorphologists and members of the 49th Civil Engineer Squadron environmental flight discovered about 70 items, ranging from a series of hearths to an early version of a stone pestle — could offer valuable information about how prehistoric people in the Southwest survived and adapted to climate change in their time, said Matthew Cuba, the squadron's cultural resource manager.
“It's significant because we have very few intact sites from this time period because … of the erosional nature of a desert environment,” Cuba, 43, said in an interview Monday. “… This is a situation in which the site retains a high degree of…
