Seven persons drowned, unknown number injured, in collapse of boat ramp on Sapelo Island, Georgia

Sapelo Island, GA is a state-owned nature preserve, ancient archaeological zone and site of a historic Gullah Community, located at the mouth of the Altamaha River. It is the probable location of the first Spanish attempt to colonize North America in 1526 and later, a Spanish mission.

It is the also the location of the oldest known shell rings in the Americas. Creek Indian historians told early French explorers that in ancient times, white people from across the ocean landed here. They mixed with local Native Americans to become the ancestors of the Arawak Peoples. Most of these Arawaks began migrating southward until some reached Peru. Some of the bands settled in the Appalachian Mountains, where they still lived, when Georgia was settled by the English in 1733.

In the mid-1990s, underwater archaeologists, employed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, discovered several Pre-Clovis campsites on the ocean floor out from Sapelo. Artifacts from individual campsites were identical to either those of Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon artifacts along the coast of France and the Iberian Peninsula. Under pressure from the Old Guard of Archaeology, the state fired the unwater archaeologists and the artifacts “disappeared.”