01/30/2017 Florida Crossroads – First Floridians

Florida’s first State Geologist, Elias Sellards, faced decades of ridicule for something he reported in 1916:  The discovery in Florida of ancient human remains among the fossils of long-extinct animals, including mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and giant sloths.  The spot in Vero Beach where he’d found those things was ignored by science for decades.  Now, archaeologists and paleontologists are excavating the site, hoping to prove what Sellards claimed:  That human beings were living in Florida thousands of years before anyone thought, during the Pleistocene Epoch when mammoths roamed the earth.  Explore what they’re finding and how they’re using advanced dating and DNA technology to study their discoveries in this edition of Florida Crossroads.