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Posted on 04/21/2002 5:41:59 PM PDT by vannrox
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Well, sister, you are not much more than a decoration pursuing an eternal pretentious hobby.
Other than lighting a fire, neither of these is especially human.
Great article and beautiful spear point.
As opposed to the "bimbo blonde" black-sheep Roosevelt women?
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) APRIL 19, 1996 --The tropical rainforest, long considered too hostile an environment for the Americas' earliest human inhabitants, appears instead to have supported a thriving society 1,000 years ago -- a startling new finding that will change the way scientists think about the migration of people throughout the New World.
Excavations of a painted cave deep within the Brazilian Amazon uncovered stone spear points, pigment, and carbonized food remains. The findings are described in the 19 April issue of the journal science. an international team of scientists studied the cave, led by the united states' anna roosevelt, curator of archaeology at chicago's field museum and professor of anthropology at the university of illinois in chicago.
The site, Caverna da Pedra Pintada, is one of a series of Paleozoic sandstone caves first noted for their rock paintings by nineteenth-century European naturalists exploring the area around the town of Monte Alegre on the Amazon north bank, between Manaus and Belem. Brazilian archaeologists and speleologists had visited the cave but never excavated it. When Roosevelt began scouting the region for potential Paleoindian sites, Monte Alegre's secretary of culture, ecology teacher Nelsi Neif Sadek, brought Roosevelt to Caverna da Pedra Pintada.
"I could see right away that it was a good bet," says Roosevelt. "It looked very liveable -- light, airy and dry."
Roosevelt brought in her team and they began to dig through well-preserved layers representing thousands of years of intermittent human occupation. Near the bottom, where Roosevelt hoped to find evidence of Paleoindian life, the soil "turned sterile and I thought, `Well, that's it. I wonder where else we can look in the area?' But we dug a little further and suddenly something snapped up into my face. It turned out to be a spear-point flake. Then the soil turned black." She had struck the archeological equivalent of gold: a layer of soil filled with dateable charcoal from human campfires and thousands of biological and cultural remains from a society that, until now, had not been thought to exist.
For decades, the general consensus has been that the earliest Americans, or Paleoindians, came from Asia across the Bering Straits near the end of the Ice Age and migrated down the Andean chain into South America, getting by as big-game hunters adapted to open, temperate regions. Despite some evidence suggesting the presence of early human foragers in subtropical areas east of the Andes, "the common assumption was that game and plant food were too scarce in the rainforest to support humans who hadn't yet developed slash and burn agriculture," says Roosevelt.
But the new evidence shows that Paleoindian families lived in Caverna da Pedra Pintada for nearly 1,200 years, foraging food from the forest and river, crafting distinctive spear points and wood-working tools chipped from stone, and decorating rocks with red and yellow images, including ghostly handprints of adults as well as children. Their culture appears to have been very different from their contemporaries in the North, further challenging the traditional view, says Roosevelt, that the North American Clovis tradition was the "donor culture of early South American societies."
Other possible Paleoindian cultures found throughout eastern South America have not been widely accepted by archaeologists due to questions about their age and ecological adaptation. Roosevelt's team subjected a wide range of the newly recovered materials to various dating techniques in a number of different laboratories around the world, and the 69 resulting dates all fall close together -- between about 11,200 and 10,000 years ago.
"It seems Paleoindians were able to adapt to a broader range of habitats than has been thought," says Roosevelt. "Amazonia, far from a dead end, fostered a dynamic cultural trajectory over thousands of years." The early foraging bands, she says, eventually gave way to fishing villages where pottery-making developed. Pottery fragments in Caverna da Pedra Pintada and nine other nearby sites date back between 5,000 and 7,500 years ago, making them the oldest pottery yet found in the Americas.
Roosevelt's team included three Brazilian researchers: Marcondes Lima da Costa of Federal University of Para, Cristiane Lopes Machado of Linhares Forest Reserve, and Maura Imazio da Silveira of the Goeldi Museum in Belem and of the University of Sao Paulo. In addition, Lazaro Ribeiro, whom Roosevelt calls "a forest savant from a small village near the cave," helped to identify most of the plant and animal species excavated from the layers. Ten taxonomists from the Goeldi Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, Michigan State University, and the Field Museum also worked on the identifications.
Sites similar to Caverna da Pedra Pintada will help anthropologists rewrite the story of human evolution. The conventional emphasis on cultures built around big-game hunting "has some serious implications" that can now be further challenged, says Roosevelt. "For example, sociobiologists have used our supposed descent from hunters to support a genetic basis for human behaviors like aggression and certain gender roles common in modern Western cultures, such as men bringing home the food and women tied to domestic chores." The prehistoric food-remains in the Brazilian cave, however, include not only large animals but also many very young animals -- a sign that women and children, as well as men, could have helped acquire food.
Success? Doesn't this 55-yr. old, childless feminist realize the irony of studying an extinct civilization? This dimwit's genes are as extinct as the people she studies. At least the 'worthless-dead-men' of her family moved the family along.
Imo she's a narcissistic waste of the Roosevelt family's resources. There's always some useless, selfish women at the end of a family's line. Hopefully, she has a few married brothers.
LOL.... funny after reading this, I lost all interest in her!
By ALEX BELLOS
The Guardian
February 14, 2000
SAO RAIMUNDO NONATO, Brazil - In the most underdeveloped state of Brazil, Piaui, lies one of the richest prehistoric archaeological sites in the world. Pedra Furada is also one of the most controversial sites in the Americas -- splitting archaeologists into two emotionally charged camps and threatening to rewrite the history of the continent's colonization.
A thinly inhabited, semi-arid area of sandstone rock shelters, 500 miles west of the coastal city Recife, Pedra Furada contains more than 400 prehistoric sites, including 340 stone walls full of ancient paintings. Researchers are still finding new remains at the rate of 40 a year.
But it is not the vast number of archaeological discoveries that has the academic world excited. It is their age.
Brazilian excavators, led by Niede Guidon, claim to have proved the existence of the oldest Americans. Guidon claims that charcoal she says is the remnant of camp fires has been carbon dated to 50,000 years ago.
This makes it the most ancient site in the Americas by a long shot -- about 40,000 years _ and if true, poses fundamental questions about how humans arrived in South America well before it is believed they arrived in the North.
This year she went one step further. In January she said the results of carbon dating tests on three fossilized teeth and a part of a human skull she found in 1987 had put their age at 15,000 years.
This would make them the oldest human remains in the Americas.
The results are controversial because they smash the traditional view, established in the 1950s, that the earliest Americans were the "Clovis hunters" from New Mexico -- whose spear points have been dated at 12,000 years ago. The Clovis hunters are thought to have migrated across the Bering strait.
Guidon says: "I don't have any doubt that the oldest traces of humans yet discovered are here in Brazil. But there will be others found. These humans had to get here somehow.
"But I think it's wrong that everyone came running across Bering chasing mammoths _ that's infantile. I think they also came along the seas. I don't see why they couldn't have come across the Atlantic."
Guidon's research has divided the academic community into two sides -- roughly between U.S. archaeologists, who refuse to accept it, and the south Americans and Europeans, who do.
Stephen Shennan, professor of archaeology at University College London, says that there has been a degree of nationalism because the north Americans cannot believe that they do not have the oldest site.
"There is a feeling that it's a blow against U.S. imperialism. The evidence is open to different interpretations, so people tend to choose their favorite interpretation in terms of their biases. There is a certain tendency to cast aspersions on other people's excavation techniques.
"The whole thing is very fraught. People get very defensive and sensitive."
Guidon has not published as much as she, perhaps, could have. But some commentators have suggested that the skeptical attitude toward her is also partly because of her gender and nationality.
Pedra Furada ("perforated rock") was put on the map by Guidon, who in 1970 was the first person to make a proper excavation there. At 66, she still excavates indefatigably despite having two metal pins in her legs.
Because of the poor state of funding in Brazil, only five archaeologists work there and only two of the 420 sites are fully excavated.
The North Americans' doubts over Guidon's claims concern the charcoal remains and chipped pebbles that she believes are manmade. "We are concerned that the hearths are in fact hearths and not natural fires. Are the pebbles truly artifacts -- or has nature been mischievous?" asks David Meltzer, of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"In the last 30 years there have been thousands of pretenders to the pre-Clovis crown. Each one dissolved under scrutiny. So we have got pretty skeptical," he said.
"But it is the case that if we have (pre-Clovis) humans in South America, then by golly, why don't we have them in North America too?"
Guidon gets fired up by North American criticism. "The carbon is not from a natural fire. It is only found inside the sites. You don't get natural fires inside the shelters.
"The problem is that the Americans criticize without knowing. The problem is not mine. The problem is theirs. Americans should excavate more and write less."
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