How much are we different than our anecstors?

Valley Life editor

A house with a nice view, perhaps high on a bluff, is considered prime real estate. So is a nice home on a lake, or perhaps nestled against a river full of fish from which you can catch dinner every night.

People today would pay top dollar for those kind of living arrangements -- and subdivisions are going in every day around those geographic features.

That kind of development today also goes to show how little humans have changed since the earliest known societies.

Those are the exact same types of places archaeologists look when trying to find clues of prior generations.

"The pattern of human behavior hasn't changed all that much," said Fran Seager-Boss. "The same places we would pick to live today were picked by people thousands of years ago."

By picking locations where people probably would have inhabited -- near rivers and lakes, on promontories and overlooks where views were spectacular and hunting would have been easier -- archaeologists like Seager-Boss have good places to start historical surveys.

From there, they can look for visible clues such as cache pits where people stored fish and other foods. Invisible clues can also be located by identifying areas that would have been popular sites.