[onlooker]

[Plantagenet]

This brings to mind the Calico Hills Archeology site in California----its at least as old and probably older then then this new site.

Calico_Early_Man_Site

Its also very controversial.

Now that there are two sites suggesting early man was in North America more than 100,000 years ago, it all seems more believable.

CHEERS!

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ow that there are two sites suggesting early man was in North America more than 100,000 years ago, it all seems more believable.

[Plantagenet]

The Calico Hills site was discovered in 1949. Until this new discovery of the Mammoth bone site, the Calico Hills site was the only proposed early man site in North America.

An early booster of the Calico Hills site was Louis Leakey, discoverer of the early man sites in Olduvai Gorge and the skeleton of "Lucy." Nonetheless Calico Hills has always been very controversial, just as the new Mammoth bone site is controversial.


Ruth Simpson and Louis Leakey at the Calico Hills site

In 1954, San Bernardino County archaeologist Ruth Simpson took some artifacts unearthed at the site to renowned scientist Louis Leakey, discoverer of early man sites in Africa’s Olduvai Gorge. Leakey believed the artifacts from Calico Hills were the products of early man, and he arranged financing for more work at the site through the National Geographic Society. He visited the desert site frequently from 1964 until his death in 1970 to collect and work on the artifacts.

Everyone who looks at the proposed Calico Hills artifacts agrees that some are indistinguishable from early man artifacts, One of the main lines of evidence presented against the idea that the "artifacts" at Calico Hills were made by humans is that they are much older then other archeological sites in North America. However, with this new finding of the worked mammoth bone dated to 100,000+ years BP, that objection is no longer viable.





Cheers!

[SeaGypsy]

That looks knapped for sure, but the aging is suss. I learned the skills from aboriginal Australians 20 years ago. Eventually i made a set of sets- 5 of each, from small arrow heads, to spearhead, skinning knife, small & large axe heads. They were good enough to completely gobsmack experts. I was thinking to sell sets to schools, before i found out that is a big taboo, as such implements are used to authenticate aboriginal sites & cannot be accurately dated.

[Subjectivist]

I find it very difficult to believe any varient of our species was here for 100,000 years before the Amerind Migration took place around 18,000 years ago. If those proposed earlier peoples were here for so long they should have left evidence all over the place, but especially in the DNA of the Amerind population that were occupying the Americas when the Europeans arrived and brought Africans with them.

We have strong DNA evidence that Neanderthal and Denisovan peoples merged into the Homo Sapiens gene pool, we shoukd see the same thing with these early hominids in the Amerind DNA profiles.

[onlooker]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 104010.htm
New Evidence Puts Man In North America 50,000 Years Ago

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 091428.htm
First humans arrived in North America a lot earlier than believed

[onlooker]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... tone-tools
Humans arrived in North America 2,500 years earlier than thought

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'T')hat looks knapped for sure, but the aging is suss. I learned the skills from aboriginal Australians 20 years ago. Eventually i made a set of sets- 5 of each, from small arrow heads, to spearhead, skinning knife, small & large axe heads. They were good enough to completely gobsmack experts. I was thinking to sell sets to schools, before i found out that is a big taboo, as such implements are used to authenticate aboriginal sites & cannot be accurately dated.

[KaiserJeep]

I personally believe in the existence of early humans in North America. I also can provide a valid reason that they did not contribute more of their DNA to the Human Genome. We have already discussed it once: The Younger Dryad Impact Hypothesis.

From Wikipedia:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he Younger Dryas impact hypothesis or Clovis comet hypothesis originally proposed that a large air burst or earth impact of one or more comets initiated the Younger Dryas cold period about 12,900 BP calibrated (10,900 14C uncalibrated) years ago.[1][2][3] The hypothesis has been contested by research showing that most of the conclusions cannot be repeated by other scientists, and criticized because of misinterpretation of data and the lack of confirmatory evidence.[4][5][6][7] However, a more recent study lends support to the hypothesis, finding a layer of elevated platinum and other metals at numerous locales across North America and Greenland, levels associated with extraterrestrial bodies.[8]

The current impact hypothesis states that the air burst(s) or impact(s) of a swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comet fragments set areas of the North American continent on fire, causing the extinction of most of the megafauna in North America and the demise of the North American Clovis culture after the last glacial period.[9] The Younger Dryas ice age lasted for about 1,200 years before the climate warmed again. This swarm is hypothesized to have exploded above or possibly on the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the region of the Great Lakes, though no impact crater has yet been identified and no physical model by which such a swarm could form or explode in the air has been proposed. Nevertheless, the proponents suggest that it would be physically possible for such an air burst to have been similar to, but orders of magnitude larger than, the Tunguska event of 1908. The hypothesis proposed that animal and human life in North America not directly killed by the blast or the resulting coast-to-coast wildfires would have likely starved on the burned surface of the continent.

1. Firestone, Richard; West, Allen; Warwick-Smith, Simon (4 June 2006). The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. Bear & Company. p. 392. ISBN 1591430615.
2. Firestone RB, West A, Kennett JP; et al. (October 2007). "Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104 (41): 16016–21. Bibcode:2007PNAS..10416016F. doi:10.1073/pnas.0706977104. PMC 1994902Freely accessible. PMID 17901202.
3. Bunch TE, Hermes RE, Moore AM; et al. (June 2012). "Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 109 (28): E1903–12. Bibcode:2012PNAS..109E1903B. doi:10.1073/pnas.1204453109. PMC 3396500Freely accessible. PMID 22711809.
4. Kerr, R. A. (3 September 2010). "Mammoth-Killer Impact Flunks Out". Science. 329 (5996): 1140–1. Bibcode:2010Sci...329.1140K. doi:10.1126/science.329.5996.1140. PMID 20813931.
5. Pinter, Nicholas; Scott, Andrew C.; Daulton, Tyrone L.; Podoll, Andrew; Koeberl, Christian; Anderson, R. Scott; Ishman, Scott E. (2011). "The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: A requiem". Earth-Science Reviews. 106 (3–4): 247. Bibcode:2011ESRv..106..247P. doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.02.005.
6. Pigati JS; Latorre C; Rech JA; Betancourt JL; Martínez KE; Budahn JR (April 2012). "Accumulation of impact markers in desert wetlands and implications for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 109 (19): 7208–12. Bibcode:2012PNAS..109.7208P. doi:10.1073/pnas.1200296109. PMC 3358914Freely accessible. PMID 22529347. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
7. Boslough, M.; K. Nicoll; V. Holliday; T. L. Daulton; D. Meltzer; N. Pinter; A. C. Scott; T. Surovell; P. Claeys; J. Gill; F. Paquay; J. Marlon; P. Bartlein; C. Whitlock; D. Grayson & A. J. T. Jull (2012). "Arguments and Evidence Against a Younger Dryas Impact Event" (PDF). GEOPHYSICAL MONOGRAPH SERIES. 198: 13–26. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
8. Moore; et al. (2017). "Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences". Nature Scientific Reports. 7: 44031. doi:10.1038/srep44031.
9. Kennett DJ, Kennett JP, West A; et al. (January 2009). "Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer". Science. 323 (5910): 94. Bibcode:2009Sci...323...94K. doi:10.1126/science.1162819. PMID 19119227.

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Essentially every scientist agrees the Calico Hills artifacts/geofacts are indistinguishable from human made tools. But the deniers then argue that they can't be human artifacts because they are too old and there are no other sites of similar age in North America.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', 'W')e ... conclude that the materials labeled as tools at the Calico site were form selected and represent a biased sample of the naturally fractured siliceous rock population of the alluvial fan at the base of the Calico Mountains.

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he scientists working at the Calico site identified some worked flint stones as human tools. OF COURSE these are a "biased sample"---these are the ones scientists picked out and identified as tools. Thats what is always done in archeological sites.

[sparky]

.
Hey Seagypsy , did some knaping too ,
I wanted to reproduce the Acheulian hand axe , the very first Swiss army knife made by our knuckles dragging forebears
then went on to spear points ,
it's easy ..lot of cuts ,scratches and bruise later ,I'm confident I could give some hopeful idiot
the proper spear to tackle one ton of diner on the hoof while I cheer him for a distance .

the surprise was mounting it in a solid fashion , that was very tricky !
I gained a lot of respect for the ancestors

[sparky]

.
Back to Early Amerids ,
Well ,that's possible but so far the evidence is scanty ,
there need to be a set of finds to establish their presence , one or two sites are not really enough

[Synapsid]

Plantagenet,

Two things:

Don Johanson discovered the Lucy material, not Louis Leakey. You have to be careful with this type of thing--priority in palaeoanthropology is grounds for spilling blood.

Remembering a long way back about the Calico material, the selecting of samples that is referred to is throughout the thickness of the fan material, not selection from a single stratigraphic horizon as would be more likely in the case you suggested. That is a main reason for skepticism: "Hey! I think I have one up here!" "Yeah, I have one [20 meters below] down here too!"

There's a similar set of locales in Brazil, especially at Pedra Furada. Artefacts or geofacts? is again the question, and the ages are far too old. At one rock shelter in a quartzite section, the broken stones on the floor are from the quartzite stratum directly above the shelter mouth but the archaeologists working there are convinced they're artefacts. I doubt it, myself.

[Synapsid]

KaiserJeep et al.,

About the demise of the Clovis culture: we need to keep in mind that the statement refers to the disappearance of a specific assemblage of stone and bone tools from the archaeological record. The iconic fluted stone point is what everyone recognizes. In the southern Great Plains we see smaller fluted stone points from the Folsom assemblage layered above Clovis material in Oklahoma sites where the dating control shows a time gap of about a century, and the researchers working the sites expect that gap to close or at least shrink as more sites are excavated. Clovis points have been associated with mammoth in a few sites in the Southwest; Folsom points are found in association with bison and, I believe, horse--that would be why they're smaller. Oh: Folsom fluted points do not look like miniature Clovis points--the flutes occupy much more of the point surface.

The takeaway: We should avoid taking "demise of the Clovis culture" type statements to refer to wipeout of people. The topic is stuff dug up.

We do have Clovis genomic material, from the Anzick child in Montana, and it shows that peoples in Central and South America are her descendants. There's a dearth of comparative genomic material from Native Americans in the US because of a long history of various kinds of abuse, but there is gradual improvement that will let us flesh out more of the history of early settlement of the New World.

[SeaGypsy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')
Hey Seagypsy , did some knaping too ,
I wanted to reproduce the Acheulian hand axe , the very first Swiss army knife made by our knuckles dragging forebears
then went on to spear points ,
it's easy ..lot of cuts ,scratches and bruise later ,I'm confident I could give some hopeful idiot
the proper spear to tackle one ton of diner on the hoof while I cheer him for a distance .

the surprise was mounting it in a solid fashion , that was very tricky !
I gained a lot of respect for the ancestors

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Synapsid', 't')he ages are far too old.....

[Synapsid]

KaiserJeep et al.,

I should have mentioned that the range of dates for the Anzick child, from Montana, is:

12 707 to 12 556 calibrated years before present. That span of time lies within the Younger Dryas.