Emanuel “Manny” Nicholas Manis (1926-2000) was excavating a dry peat bog on his property in Happy Valley (just south of Sequim, WA) with a backhoe when he found two tusks of an American mastodon on August 8, 1977.

[11] In an excavated layer above the mastodon, as well as that of a 6,700-year-old deposit of ash from the eruption of Mount Mazama, a projectile-point was found in the style of Cascade points common in the area no earlier than 9,000 years ago.

Though stone tools and artifacts of bone were found, Gustafson failed to find evidence of an encampment by the people theorized to have butchered the mastodons.

In Oct. 2011, the Center of the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), Anthropology Department at Texas A&M University published findings from DNA tests, CT scans and radiocarbon dating on the mastodon and the spear point.

Since the 1950s, archaeologists have believed the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America and that they lived here 13,000 years ago.

However the discovery of sites pre-dating Clovis, such as Monte Verde in Chile and Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, have been challenging this presumption at least since the 1990s.

This site, among others, is helping to change the long-held beliefs of many archaeologists about the earliest human inhabitants of North America.