Knife Lake: Rewriting prehistory

Past Horizons ^ | Saturday, October 8, 2011 | unattributed (David Connolly?)

[SunkenCiv]

Knife Lake straddles the border between Canada and Minnesota, with Quetoco Provincial Park to the north, and the famous Boundary Waters on the U.S. side. Professor Mark Muniz of St. Cloud State and fellow researches have been digging around there, and what they have found is fairly amazing if their dating holds up.

The Ojibwe name for what the glaciers carved from the earth is Mookomaan Zaaga'igan, while the French fur traders called it Lac des Couteaux, or Lake of Knives.

Stone tools found in this area may date from 11,000 to 12,500 years ago, which would indicate that the glacier that once existed must have receded earlier than thought, or at least that this place became inhabitable much earlier than thought possible.

If his theory is correct and Muniz has found more evidence this summer to support it, Paleo-Indians will have first inhabited northern Minnesota as glaciers receded 11,000-12,500 years ago.

That would run contrary to the belief that the area had not yet recovered enough to support plants and animals after being scoured by glaciers. It would also be contrary to the thought that the first people to live in the Arrowhead region arrived hundreds, if not thousands of years after Paleo-Indians appeared in the southern part of the state.

[SunkenCiv]

Paleo-Indian artefacts. Image: St. Cloud State University

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Renfield. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Just another Joe]

Where water is, there will mankind be.

It takes water for plants to grow. Also fish and mollusks.
In addition, water is a highway for those without powered transportation.

[Dogbert41]

It’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, just look what our neighbors to the South were doing about that time:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_PumaPunku.htm

[Dogbert41]

It’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, just look what our neighbors to the South were doing about that time:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_PumaPunku.htm

[muawiyah]

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter54/text-Clovis/Clovispoints.jpg ~ similar style. Item on your right in that st. cloud shot is a KNIFE and in my experience it is SHORT OF HAVING BEEN FINISHED. Maybe it was tossed away, or maybe it was just an emergency working blank.

[muawiyah]

SC, the Clovis points we got out of the well we dug on our lot in Indianapolis kinda proved that Clovis were there BEFORE the Younger Dryas ~ because the returning cold climate, and more moving ice, and the continuing drainage of the Ice Sheet through what is now Central Indiana covered the Clovis materials up with a layer of dirt.

This was maybe 20 to 30 miles south of the furthest advance of some really really tall ice ~ well over a mile. Kind of the melt limit on the ice so there was grass, etc. while the rest of the Midwest was still pretty much an iceage desert.

[ForGod'sSake]

The only thing I’m curious about, aside from the age of this stuff, which I suspect will be found to be much younger than presented is, how did these academics choose this particular area? It seems to have no other claim than to be exactly in the middle of nowhere.

[21twelve]

One more piece of evidence that proves that global warming is a LOT better than global cooling.

[SunkenCiv]

from that link — “weighs an estimated 440 tons (equal to nearly 600 full-size cars)” — a full-size car nowadays runs a bit more than a ton, so that’s wrong. But regardless, there’s no scientific dating for that site showing it to be tens of thousands of years old, as some had claimed at one time. There’s no writing there (as that page notes), but someone decided that there must be solar alignments, found out that they didn’t work, then decided that the solar alignments must have worked at one time, and figured out how long ago that would have been. That isn’t a scientific approach.

[SunkenCiv]

Wholeheartedly agree. It’s even true now — something like 90 of the human population of the world lives within a few hundred feet of sealevel.

[piasa]

The one on the right to which you refer looks, IMHO, to have been fractured during manufacture - hence the very coarse unfinished look to the percussion flaking. My bad monior makes it impossible to see well but the one on the left looks to have been snapped during manufacture as well. So you are right, they are likely discards. If material is scarce they might rework the bits into different tools like scrapers, but in the clovis period those big percussion flakes knocked off in the process of making the knife were great sharp tools as-is for butchering even if the knife didn't work out, so they already had lots of perfect scrapers and shavers and there probably wasn't much incentive to spend extra time reworking mistakes. A snapped knife blade was not a big loss when the attempt to make it naturally provided hundreds of spinoff tools.

In the item on the right there is the additional problem of shelf fractures - they stop the progress of the flaking and so, make it impossible to thin the blade to the point of being useful. Even if it hadn't snapped the thing was headed for the trash pile. Sometimes you can get around shelf fractures but most of the time they just keep on stacking up on you and your "blank" gets narrower but not thinner.

Those big scallops left by the percussion removal of flakes were very sharp too, even if they look roughly serrated [google the Wenatchee caches] compared to the pressure flaking of more recent times; large rough scallops were essential to cut through thick hides and tendons of big game. The edges on new knives would start out looking very wavey, even crude, but would become more and more "refined" as they were resharpened. What looks most "refined," even and gracefully curved to us would actually be near the end of their useful life.

[norwaypinesavage]

Actually, Leif Erikson imported these stone tools from Norway to fool the locals into thinking the Norwegians were there first.

[colorado tanker]

Naturally, people wanted to get up there as soon as the region was habitable. Best place to brew beer.

[SunkenCiv]

Is Hamm’s still made?

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[colorado tanker]

To the best of my knowledge, Hamm’s is still being made by MillerCoors, but distribution is limited. Obviously, those campy TV ads are no more. From the Land of Sky Blue Waaaters . . . .