Much of what we know about the folks who used to live in this neighborhood is because Camas County farmer Bill Simon had such sharp eyes.

In fall 1961, Simon was scraping a roadway on his property near Fairfield, using a bulldozer and a carryall. He glanced at an 18-inch-deep trench he’d just dug and noticed several stone spear points at the bottom. Simon summoned some neighbors to help him look around, and they found more.

The farmer had the wit to call the archaeology department at Idaho State College in Pocatello, and when researcher Robert Butler set eyes on the spear points he was astounded.

They were Clovis points, named after the town in New Mexico where similar artifacts were first found, and they were at least 11,000 years old.

At the time, that was far older than the period most archaeologists believed humankind first roamed the steppes of south-central Idaho. But research going on at about the same time 60 miles to the southeast would change that opinion.

In 1959 and 1960, Ruth Gruhn — a Radcliff College-trained archaeologist — surveyed Wilson Butte Cave south of Dietrich, did radiocarbon dating of the artifacts she found there, and estimated there was evidence of human habitation 14,500 years ago.

Gruhn’s hypothesis about the age of the Wilson Butte artifacts was and still is controversial, but together she and Simon changed the conversation about who we are and where we came from.

Oregon-based journalist Randy Stapilus, a longtime Idaho newspaperman, describes our Idaho predecessors in his 2002 book, “It Happened in Idaho.”

The hunters mainly kept to the valleys which range from 4,900 feet to 5,400 feet elevation, for the game – deer, bears and bison. And also for the obsidian, the naturally occurring volcanic glass perfect for use as spear points.

“In the firelight, the hunters prepared their weapons, pounding flakes from the core of stones they found and placing them under the campfire, heat-treating them,” Stapilus said. “It took about eight hours to get the stones just right for reshaping. The hunters used small rocks or sometimes part of an antler to hammer the stone into a sharp, V-shaped point.”

Sometimes these spear points were traded with other bands of hunters. Some may have been cached —left behind for later use — like the ones Simon discovered many millennia later.

How many millennia remains an open question. Since 1975, when unexpectedly old human artifacts were discovered at a site in Chile, the archaeology community has been divided by disagreement about when the first migrants arrived in North America from Asia. Some scientists now believe it may have been more than 30,000 years ago.

Steve Crump is the Times-News Opinion editor.