Archeologists who question Clovis First have been branded as renegades, said Raymond Le Blanc, an archeologist at the University of Alberta. "It's almost like admitting you saw a UFO," he said.
Le Blanc was a grad student on Cinq-Mars's team at the Bluefish Caves in the mid-1970s, when the exploration there started. (It took another 15 years to analyze the material uncovered and publish the results.) Far from being a ticket to fame and fortune, bucking the Clovis First doctrine has meant "you become part of the fringe. It's not great for your career. It becomes a little more difficult to get (research) money," he said.
Indeed, since the potentially stunning finds in Beringia, Cinq-Mars said he has struggled to cobble together research funds to continue the exploration and analyze what's been found.
"My biggest problem is getting access to funding. This is a scientific gold mine we've been sitting on for years, but many people just didn't give a hoot. There has been and still is very strong resistance. Clovis First has been the credo of archeology for decades," he said.
The waters have been muddied by scientific acrimony about the Bluefish Cave mammoth bone evidence. Some of Cinq-Mars's detractors say the bone could have been chipped at a later point long after the mammoth died or through natural processes like erosion or falling rocks.
"I'm very, very skeptical about cave data," said Bob Gall, a veteran archeologist with the U.S. National Park Service in Fairbanks, Alaska.
"They're occupied by animals and people, and material rolls down slopes. You have rock falls and material that's really difficult to sort out." Even if the mammoth bone was indeed modified by a person, Gall said it's still not clear when that would have happened. "From the time that elephant died, up until the present, it could have been modified by man," he said.
Subsequent research showed the bone was indeed likely to have been chipped by humans shortly after the mammoth died, but the questions have lingered, with many scientists saying more confirming data is needed.
That, in turn, has led to an archeological Catch-22: Little funding is available to pursue the Beringia research. "There are more things from that site we could date, but there has been a lack of money," Le Blanc said.
Complicating the search for confirming evidence is the fact that the best human sites to explore in the region are now probably at the bottom of the Bering Strait, said Ruth Gotthardt, an archeologist with the Yukon government. "The evidence is not co-operating," she said.
But now, the region is seeing renewed scientific interest as evidence emerges to suggest Cinq-Mars may have been on the right track after all
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Gods |
The dam has burst, eh Blam? :') Thanks! |
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Must have had a mean tail...