USC excavation site yields vital discovery

Evidence from USC's Topper site, an archaeological excavation in Allendale County, is changing the way many archaeologists look at North America.

For many years, archaeologists thought the first people to settle in the Americas arrived about 12,000 years ago by traveling across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia.

But the Topper excavation site, which was featured on Alan Alda's "Scientific American Frontiers" on PBS, provided recent findings that might suggest humans arrived well before these Paleo-Indians, possibly as far back as 25,000 years ago ... The Gamecock