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.
Can we Xerox you and sprinkle you on other threads? Seriously, people that can think for themselves are so rare...
And may I heartily agree with you, isn't it amazing what you can deduce from personal observation and how quickly out government schools squash that ability. Thank you for posting your observations.
Thanks for the compliment! It's amazing what you can learn by just stepping back and being quiet! I know that growing up on a farm helped shape me too. You learn a lot by watching animals and weather-everything else just builds on those lessons.:)
Some of the most reknowned archeologists of all time were little more than enthusiasts when they made their big discoveries.
I think you missed the point of farmboy's question, although he wasn't very direct about it. What I interpeted from his question was a challenge of sorts namely: If those rocks existed and you knew of their location, why haven't you formally reported their existence and challenged the scientific community with your findings?
That is sarcasm, I think, but you know, sometimes a coincidences is just a coincidence. It is quite possible that a population moved in after some event caused the collape of the large mammal population. It may have been a meteor.
That's right. Like my grandfather taught me when he was buiding a barn with his neighbors, you have to have a firm foundation. He was right. Once you have the basics right, you can build as high as you like... No firm foundation, you are a Leaning Tower of Pisa, forever biased.
I think Farmboy has made a similar discovery and he was commiserating!
It does no good to challenge some theories, because there are just too many willfully blind people out there. Besides that, we moved when I was about 12. Haven't been back since, but the farm is still there. Given about five minutes and weather warm enough for wading, I could have you walking in those prints. I do remember they were small, both the human and equine. My feet fit well in the prints, they weren't much bigger than mine-of course they could have been a child's prints. :) The equine tracks weren't much bigger than those of my pony-probably why I noticed them in the first place. We had a huge pasture/woods and if my pony got a whiff of bridle, he was gone. I learned to track pretty well!
Love yours too! LOL
Notice to young, single (or old & married) archeologists - forget SunkenCiv and check this out!!!!
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=2032
Becaaaause, unless you have a Ph.D after your name you have no credentials and cannot get a hearing. This phenomena is closely related to the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome. No academic is going to listen to a layman or quote them.
FORGOT TO ADD
WOMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We had a childhood most kids only dream about nowadays. If our chores were done-we were free. I spent hours-days-playing in the creek. We built dams out of rock and wood, caught crawdads and minnows, learned where the clay hid under the banks, soaked up the sights and sounds of wind and water and animals.
There was this one vein of blue clay-think Picts? or was it Celts?-we smeared ourselves head to toe one day and went home when it dried. Keep in mind, we had a hand pump and a wringer washer! I thought mom was going to kill us!
We made bowls and caught tadpoles, our imaginations knew no bounds.
We just accepted the tracks in the bed of our creek as one more normal thing, no more remarkable than anything else there.
In this article, for example, it is assumed that if some folks came here on boats, that that would invalidate the Bering land bridge idea. In my opinion, the discussion should be about how much of the continent was populated by people from one source versus another, and how far they migrated, and how much they mixed with each other.
Another is the whole Neanderthal/homo-sapien inter-breeding thing. If they were co-inhabitants of the same area at the same time and physically capable of inter-breeding, then they did. The question is how much and to what degree that is represented in the current population.
Maybe it is just the press being ignorant or uneducated. /rant
I disagree about it doing no good to challenge some theories though, sometimes just having the challenge on record is enough even if the challenge was not successful. It's a funny thing about evidence and facts, people may willfully ignore, marginalize, or falsely interpret them, but eventually someone will come along with an open mind and set the record straight.
You should report the rocks to the closest University. There are tons of cases of things found in University collections that weren't understood or purposely miscategorized when they were discovered which were later reinterpreted.
Except that the northern plains tribes do talk about the coming of the horse in their tribal oral histories. It's what allowed the Sioux, for instance, to move out of the Minnesota woods and onto the Great Plains in the early 18th Century, and to move from small shelters into bigger teepees that they could only transport with the help of horses and travois.
Archaeology shows no signs of pre-Columbian Indians using horses. No petroglyphs. No artifiacts. No horse bones have been found dating between the extinction ca. 10,000 years ago and ca. 1500 AD. Furthermore, Indians wouldn't need to just spontaneously figure out that you could ride these new animals. The Mexican Indians saw the Spanish riding and picked it up. Then it was just a matter of the next tribe north seeing that it could be done while the horse population exploded across the plains with ample food and no predators to speak of. Two hundred years is plenty of time for that knowledge to spread from Mexico to Minnesota.
Thanks, SandwicheGuy! That sums it up in a nutshell!
Pay no attention to the elephant in the corner!
Tonya Parker Morrison specializes in unique entertainment articles referencing the most interesting personalities and concepts from music, movies and television. With more than 15 years of experience, she has conducted thousands of interviews which have run in hundreds of publications - online and off - worldwide. Groundbreaking information and a uniquely laid back interview style make Parker Morrison one of the industry's most popular journalists.
There are also tons of discoveries mouldering in forgotten back rooms because the evidence doesn't fit. :)
Every case I've ever seen of human prints found in rock got the same treatment-scepticism followed by outright disbelief.
Smartie Sunken - LOL
For the women in the audience - take a gander at Josh Bernstein on the left of the page:
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=2032
I hope that clarifies it.
tee hee
sp
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