Museum teams unearth 4,000-year-old home in Ohio

The earliest known residents of Lorain County left no historical records of who they were and how they lived.

They left only fragments of evidence, buried by time, that yield their secrets only to patient exploration and trained eyes.

Patience, hard work and study paid off this summer for Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and his team of dedicated diggers.

In a clearing that once was farmland and now is part of the Lorain County Metroparks, they uncovered the floor of a dwelling built 4,000 years ago.

5/15. Awl made of deer bone found at the site. (Marvin Fong / The Plain Dealer)

"There's nothing like this anywhere in Ohio. It's very significant, a much more significant site than we previously thought," Redmond said. "These are house structures. This was like a village site."

The builders lived in what archaeologists classify as the Late Archaic period in North America, so far back that they don't have a tribal name. [...] cleveland.com