by Kenneth Tankersley
foreword by Douglas Preston
Posted on 06/17/2015 2:35:54 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Thousands of years ago, a human -- probably hungry and right-handed -- found an old spear point amid these low hills and re-shaped it.
Last week [in 2013] University of Cincinnati student Liz Ceddia found it again: flaked in a distinctive pattern and still sharp enough to break skin...
The students are working with Ken Tankersley, a University of Cincinnati archaeology professor who first visited the area as a child. He keeps coming back to seek evidence of how climate change affects area flora and fauna. It's one of his major areas of research.
Big Bone Lick State Park -- its signs announce it as the "birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology" -- is the site of Tankersley's student dig, which is open to the public.
Here's the thing about archaeological digging and screening: It's just like digging for anything else, except more precise. There is a lot of mud, passing huge buckets loaded down with muck and wading around seeking more than a bit of heated stone or wood in the bucket. Students joke about their arm-muscle development...
The layers of soil being excavated, shovel by shovel and bucket by bucket, can show why some species, such as caribou, vanish from the landscape, then reappear.
Species that find their environment and food sources changing have three options, Tankersley said. They could move away (as the grazing caribou did, to the north); become more compact (to survive on less food); or die...
The bison lived here once, as did mammoths, beavers the size of black bears, and giant sloths the size of trees.
Kenneth Barnett Tankersley faculty page at U of Cincinnati
http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/anthropology/faculty-and-staff.html?eid=tankerkh&thecomp=uceprof
Sheriden: A Clovis cave site in eastern North America http://www.academia.edu/10622375/Sheriden_A_Clovis_cave_site_in_eastern_North_America
by Kenneth Tankersley
foreword by Douglas Preston
Future Disaster Which are "Impossible to Control" [FULL Documentary HD 720p]
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Unfortunate name for a state park...
Woke in the middle of the night, the above video was playing, the segment was about Tankersley's work in Sheridan cave.
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Woke in the middle of the night, the above video was playing, the segment was about Tankersley's work in Sheridan cave.
May be perfect for young adults though. ;’)
indeed.
I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that we have a state park called “Big Bone Lick”.
As far as dating human habitation in the Western Hemisphere, I believe that the closest analogy is how geo-physicist treated plate tectonics until the older scientists finally died out or were convinced. I clearly remember 'settled science' that the earliest paleo-indian populations in the modern US were the Clovis People in New Mexico area about 11,200 BC.
Now we are finding sites like this and others scattered in many US places and down south as far as Chile. Well accepted dates predate Clovis by 1,000+ years and some estimates GREATLY exceed those dates. Something to remember is that it takes TIME to build populations, especially for very scattered nomadic populations.
Having a floor beneath which dates can’t sink isn’t new in American archaeology, or perhaps rather what passes for archaeology. It would be great if the obstacles to acceptance would die off, but I’m not sure it would help. Before Clovis-first-and-only caught on, human antiquity in the Americas was pegged around 1000 BC. Clovis was controversial and even pseudoscientific until the 1950s when RC dating destroyed objections to the dating. Having Clovis as the new floor required that a small group of hunters hustled across Beringia, waiting thousands of years for the ice to melt, then exploded across the landscape, super-hunting megafauna to extinction in order to feed what *had to* be the largest and most rapid population explosion ever documented (even though it has never been in evidence). From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the single group of immigrants covered two continents so rapidly that the dating can’t be discerned from one to another.
“Big Bone Lick State Park”
Who says that government types lack a sense of humor.
Oh, I agree but the ability to suggest 'settled science' ain't, is just so hard to resist. I am a firm believer in the axiom from the late great Arthur C Clarke which goes; "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
My personal guesstimate is that the initial migrants probably came down the ice sheet in kayaks (skin boats) hunting and fishing and camping on shorelines long since flooded from the glacier melt. They had a clear shot down the west coast of the Americas and good hunting all of the way south. Waiting for the overland ice-free passage probably brought additional peoples that intermarried but there have been people here a very long time!
He’s gonna be coming back for a long time if he hopes of seeking evidence of climate change.
I just finished reading that book about three weeks ago.
May I be on your ping list?
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