1859 Spring 2010

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The Time
Traveler’s Life
interview by Kevin Max
Archaeologist Dr. Dennis Jenkins went to the Paisley Caves
to settle a decades-old dispute and ended up with the
oldest human remains in the Western Hemisphere
Q
A
In 1937, Luther Cressman, credited as being
the founder of Oregon anthropology, first
excavated the Paisley Caves, acting on the tip
of Walter Perry, a local who knew a woman
who had been digging there for artifacts. The
Paisley Caves are a system of eight caves north
of the town of Paisley at the top of the Great
Basin. At this point, no human remains had
been found that dated beyond the Clovis era
(13,500-12,800 years ago). Clovis people were
believed to have been the first inhabitants of the
New World of the Western Hemisphere, and all
Native Americans in North and South America
were their descendents. In 1940, Cressman and
his crews found camel, bison and horse bones
near human artifacts that they thought were as
old or older than the Clovis era. But because of
Cressman’s flawed methods, a shadow of doubt
was cast on his findings at the Paisley Caves for
decades and beyond his death in 1994.
In 2002, Dr. Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist
at the University of Oregon, returned to the
Paisley Caves to test Cressman’s controversial
theory that humans were living alongside
camels, horses and bisons at that time in the
Northern Great Basin. Jenkins, along with
the UO archaeological field school, excavated
the caves, practicing the most rigorous field
methods, and made their own discovery—
bones of camels, horses, bison and an extinct
artiodactyl alongside human feces that all
radiocarbon dated to around 14,280 years old.
Not only had Jenkins and his crew vindicated
the earlier work of Cressman, they had found
and directly dated the oldest human remains
(DNA) in the Western Hemisphere.
Jenkins, who got his undergraduate and
master’s degrees from the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, spent a lot of his adult
life on archaeological projects in the Mojave
Desert, before returning to Oregon for his
doctorate. He is a senior staff archaeologist at
the Museum of Natural and Cultural History
at the University of Oregon.
Outside of purely academic circles, Jenkins’
findings have been celebrated with film
segments on The History Channel, Oregon
Field Guide segments on Oregon Public
Broadcasting, magazine and newspaper
articles and a recent article in the March issue
of Parade, a national celebrity magazine.
34 1859 oregon's magazine spring 2010