Posted on 01/15/2007 7:49:20 AM PST by FLOutdoorsman
University of Texas at Austin researcher says the first Americans arrived earlier than previo
Schoolchildren can recite the story of the first Americans.
About 12,000 years ago, prehistoric humans walked out of Siberia, trekked across the Bering land bridge and down an ice-free corridor into inner North America, where they hunted Ice Age elephants and peopled the new world.
But mounting evidence is slowly turning that story to fiction, said Michael Collins, an archaeologist with the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
For more than 20 years, Collins and other scientists have been digging up artifacts from Chile to Texas that convince them the first Americans didn't walk here at all, but came by boat, and arrived much earlier than previously thought.
"This has been hotly debated," Collins said. "That theory has held sway for 70 years or so. But a few of us for the last 25 years have come to seriously doubt that theory."
Collins is in San Antonio today to talk about the shifting debate over the first Americans. Collins and archaeologist Robert Ricklis, who excavated a 7,000-year-old cemetery near Victoria, will speak at a Southern Texas Archaeological Association meeting at the University of the Incarnate Word. The meeting is open to the public.
For decades, the first Americans were thought to be the Clovis people, named after a site in Clovis, N.M., where 11,000-year-old fluted points were found in the 1930s. Since then, Collins said, other sites in Pennsylvania, Chile and Virginia have yielded older finds.
Collins first became convinced of "pre-Clovis" ancestors in 1967, after discovering burned mammal bones with butcher marks at a site called Cueva Quebrada in Val Verde County. Carbon dating of charcoal put the bones at 14,000 years old. To this day, most other scientists have ignored those findings, Collins said.
In the 1970s, Collins worked on a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde, which contained artifacts at least 1,000 years older than those at the Clovis sites. At first, many scientists attacked the validity of the evidence and clung to the theory that the Clovis people arrived first, Collins said. Over time, they began to accept the site and the tide of opinion turned, he said.
"I spent 20 years of my life being beat up over that project, as did everyone else," Collins said. "It has finally, begrudgingly, earned the support of a significant majority of archaeologists."
But if the Clovis people were not here first, who were the first Americans?
"It's really a case of stay tuned," Collins said. Theories have been proffered, but none universally accepted, he said.
Collins himself believes America was likely peopled on two fronts. Coastal communities in both Asia and Europe likely made their way to the New World on boats, sticking close to ice shelves to fish and hunt sea mammals. Though no ancient boats have been found, Collins points to evidence that Asians traveled to Australia 50,000 years ago, presumably in boats, since the island continent has never been connected to a land mass.
Collins also points to evidence from Japan that suggests prehistoric humans 30,000 years ago ate deep-sea fish and possessed obsidian found only on distant Japanese islands, which also suggests the use of boats.
Though this far-flung evidence interests Collins, his efforts to debunk the Clovis-first theory are closer to home.
For the past several years, he has led work at the Gault site, a large Clovis campsite midway between Georgetown and Fort Hood. A rich bounty of evidence at Gault suggests the Clovis people were not highly mobile hunters, as previously thought. It's more likely they were somewhat settled hunter-gatherers who occasionally felled a mammoth, but lived mostly on plants and smaller game such as frogs, turtles and birds.
"(Gault) is the poster child for Clovis not fitting the theoretical model," Collins said.
of course you have absolute proof of this, right? Public school, right?
They are not native americans as the PC police insist on calling them. They are Siberian Americans.
At first, many scientists attacked the validity of the evidence and clung to the theory that the Clovis people arrived first, Collins said. Over time, they began to accept the site and the tide of opinion turned, he said.
Conventional wisdom and consensus are the enemies of science everywhere, as it always has been. History is riddled with examples of situations where science was stalled because of entrenched consensus in wrong theories. For example, when Lord Kelvin estimateed the age of the earth he was way off, but to attempt to second guess him was tantamount to scientific heresy. Scientists can be surpisingly closed minded and unwilling to examine evidence which is counter to their expectiations.
there were horse...then the first Indians (we can call them Paleo-Americans) came...then there were no horses...then there were the Spanish..then there were horses...the Indians took to the idea of riding them at that time(and probably ate some too).
....whether or not the indians killed off the indigenous horses (ie. caused their extinction) is not provable....but finding horse bones with cut marks from stone tools gives science a pretty good idea that the earliest Paleo-Americans killed and ate horse (and mammoth, giant ground sloth, giant bison....etc)
How dare you question the great and terrible state-school! Do pay attention to the politicians behind the curtain...
I learned to read a lot, keep my eyes open and my mouth shut! I formed opinions early on and had my own theories about how things worked.
Questioning and then insulting before you had the answer was not really wise. Kind of snotty, actually. Private school, right? ;-)
"In the late Pleistocene (~10,000 years ago), there was a rash of extinctions that wiped out most of the large mammals in North and South America . All the horses of North and South America died out, along with the mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. These extinctions seem to have been caused by a combination of climatic changes and overhunting by humans, who had just reached these continents. For the first time in tens of millions of years, there were no equids in the Americas."
http://www.fs.fed.us/rangelands/ecology/wildhorseburro/whb_faqs.shtml
Any idea of the age of the human footprints?
None, but I would love to know! Judging from the wealth of prints, and the layers of rock, this creek bed must have been a well traveled swampy, muddy area for a long, long time. The layers were any where from six inches to half an inch thick. The different prints showed up the most close to a waterfall where the rock had been worn away like steps. The human prints were near the top layers.
I grew up on a farm in lower Ohio. We had several creeks on the property, most with layers of smooth rock for the beds. In those beds, in the different layers, were vast amounts of footprints. Everything from tractor-looking dinosaur tracks to every imaginable animal to human footprints, clearly delineated. I spent many a day walking in those footprints, wondering where those long gone peoples were traveling to or from. Not only that, there were dog and horse tracks right along side the human prints. I didn't find out til much later that there weren't any horses in the new world when people were there. Being a farm kid, I knew and could identify most tracks. Guess the scientists were much smarter than a dumb farm kid! :) I figured out-all by myself-that rock either formed much faster than I'd been told, or the scientist-who-knew-everything didn't know as much as they thought!
XXXXXXXXXXXX
OK GARDENGIRL
SO WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR FARM KNOWLEDGE OF THIS EXCITINGG SITE AND FIND?
TELL ME MORE?
OLD FARMBOY FROM MICHIGAN
Love to have some shots of those, seriously.
A few years ago it was taught that the third whale with a mother and baby Humpback was a "nanny" female whale. It turns out they are males. Also , the Humpbacks are "gentle giants". Now they know that they fight like hell over the females at mating season, often bloodying the waters. And on top of that, are they not still teaching that man evolved from a monkey?
It is so hard to keep your mouth shut in the face of obvious ignorance! I learned to keep quiet in school but since I've become an adult, I'm much more likely to confront stupidity. I know, I know-it doesn't do any good. :)
For instance, I now live in coastal NC. Did a field trip with one of my younguns to one of the barrier islands. The college students in charge started off with-don't worry about where you're walking-there aren't any snakes out here.
He was from Minn, other was from Wisc. I stopped him where he was and told him, made sure the kids heard. "The biggest copperhead I ever saw was killed just a couple blocks from here." That went over like a lead balloon!
HIs next comment was-there have never been any tall trees on these barrier islands, only scrub. I stopped him again, asked him if he'd ever read any history? The first ships to come over sent back detailed reports of the abundant forests with TALL trees that covered the islands.
Needless to say, he made sure he stayed far away from me for the rest of the field trip!
Thanks! Looks like another FR GGG topic.
Iberia, Not Siberia
Team Atlantis | 12-6-2000 | Michael A Arbuthnot
Posted on 12/21/2003 12:48:22 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1044449/posts
Nothing-because according to the experts it can't exist!
I remember reading an article awhile back about a portion of a creek bed much like mine being uncovered, and the discovery of human prints there as well. The scientist in charge accused the local towns people of carving the footprints and covering them back up! BWAHAHA!
I don't see what the 'emotional" fervor is about.Since "'emotional' fervor" is only mentioned in your post, neither do I.
They're never really established any evidence for anything older than 12,000 years old - this only debates whether relatively close to Clovis were 13,000 - 13,500 or 14,000 years old."They've" established evidence for PreClovis human sites in the Americas.
The entire continent was crossed east-west regularly by families on foot in 9 months. Pretending that families (equally on foot!) could NOT cross equally hard terrain going north-south (only three times as far, with the weather getting better the farther south they go!) in 1000, 2000, or 3000 years is foolish.No, pretending that the Monte Verde dates are younger than the Bering route is foolish.
So would I. Alas, we moved a long time ago. Last time I checked, the farm was still there and I doubt the rocks have gone anywhere.
"Even if the Indians killed horses for food is no reason to state the the Indians killed off the horses."
They contributed to the horses demise by overhunting. That's not an uncommon theory that is heavily supported by facts. That's pretty solid green light to state it, IMO.
Even if the Indians killed horses for food is no reason to state the the Indians killed off the horses. It was pretty easy to discover the earth travels around the sun but to state things that can not be known is often ridiculous.I wholeheartedly agree. There is no evidence that the horse was killed off by the tribes; there is also not one iota of evidence that the horse was reintroduced to the tribes by the Spanish.
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