Oregon cave discoveries offer insight to ancient culture

(Update: Correcting nature of discoveries at caves in lead)

There’s an area not far from Bend that contains some of the oldest evidence of mankind in North America. One of the major archeologists behind the discoveries presented his findings in Bend on Tuesday.

The caves are near the small town of Paisley, about 130 miles southeast of Bend. They were first excavated in the late 1930s, then reopened by archeologist Dr. Dennis Jenkins and his team from University of Oregon.

Jenkins spent years digging in the Paisley Caves. He hoped to disprove the theory that the Clovis people were the first people in North America — and based on the mountain of data he’s collected, he did.

Because of Jenkins’ work, the Paisley Caves are now the best-dated archeological site in North America.

“At the Paisley Caves, we have human feces that has human DNA in it. We have directly dated some of those at 14,600 years, actually. So we have good an artifact as we can possibly get,” Jenkins said.

Human feces is especially important, because it can tell researchers what that person ate in the previous 24 hours. It also contains DNA — and with that DNA, Jenkins and his team discovered that the Paisley Cave inhabitants were of Siberian decent.

Researchers also found human hair with lice eggs on it and all sorts of butchered animal bones, including camel bones.

Despite having spent 40 years in the field, Jenkins’ enthusiasm for archeology remains strong.

“Incredibly exciting, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve gotten phone calls from researchers doing an analysis for me and they say, ‘Are you sitting down? We’ve got horse protein residues on one of your tools.’ Or mammoth or mastadon. It’s just incredible,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins also was presenting his findings at the Belfry in Sisters Tuesday night.