Posted on 03/28/2014 9:09:21 AM PDT by Theoria
Niede Guidon still remembers her astonishment when she glimpsed the paintings.
Preserved amid the bromeliad-encrusted plateaus that tower over the thorn forests of northeast Brazil, the ancient rock art depicts fierce battles among tribesmen, orgiastic scenes of prehistoric revelry and hunters pursuing their game, spears in hand.
“These were stunning compositions, people and animals together, not just figures alone,” said Dr. Guidon, 81, remembering what first lured her and other archaeologists in the 1970s to this remote site where jaguars still prowl.
Hidden in the rock shelters where prehistoric humans once lived, the paintings number in the thousands. Some are thought to be more than 9,000 years old and perhaps even far more ancient. Painted in red ocher, they rank among the most revealing testaments anywhere in the Americas to what life was like millenniums before the European conquest began a mere five centuries ago.
But it is what excavators found when they started digging in the shadows of the rock art that is contributing to a pivotal re-evaluation of human history in the hemisphere.
Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Looks like Prof. Guidon doesn't play around:'At her home on the grounds of a museum she founded to focus on the discoveries in Serra da Capivara, she said she believed that humans had reached these plateaus even earlier, around 100,000 years ago, and might have come not overland from Asia but by boat from Africa.'
Prevailing scientific theory that is beyond debate is shown to be wrong yet again.
she said she believed ..................
But, Patron Saint of African evolution, L S B Leakey, said stone tools in the Americas were 125000 years old!
No one there believed him but no one challenged him either.
Some guy at the Daily Beast wrote an article that was a mixture of Leftist ideology and science claiming recent genetic tests proved the Clovis theory is true. He ridiculed the theory that the proto-Europeans Solutrean came before the Clovie Era was the works of racists. Looks like that guy needs to go back to his piece with this new information.
I can understand Africans desire to leave, however, they have never envisioned anything like travel on the oceans or shoe laces. Lets try a peoples like the Phoenicians or Mesopotamians. Africans missed the bronze age, iron age and industrial revolution for a reason!
” orgiastic scenes of prehistoric revelry”
Proving that porn has always been popular.
” Stuart Fiedel, an archaeologist with the Louis Berger Group, an environmental consulting company, said that monkeys might have made the tools instead of humans.”
Impossible! There were no Democrats back then.
Yep, it used to be career suicide to go against the Clovis First theory. It was settled science and enforced much the same way that AGW is enforced today. I love holding up Clovis First as an example of how settled science often is not and how a group of scientists in a field can intimidate peers from putting forth competing theories despite growing evidence that their pet theory could be wrong.
Leakey is considered wrong about the tools, and was disputed immediately, but he was on the right ground — he looked at what was known even at that time about the PreColumubian civilizations, which are all different, along with the many different languages and language families. It’s clear and obvious that the Americas have been colonized multiple times, and the population shifts due to climate and population booms have been numerous and of great antiquity.
“Beyond debate” is something that is projected onto scientific questions by people who are not scientists.
Hey, you can’t have ideology without mindless conformity, and can’t take over supreme power without attacking all other points of view. :’)
Isolationism — which is popular with some people even here on FR — is and was a political view, and was the root cause of the widespread popularity of Alex Hrdlicka’s relentless attacks upon the idea of precolumbian contact. The fact is, he was an overbearing a-hole.
It’s also a fact that he picked off a lot of low-hanging fruit(cakes) who claimed that this or that culture in the Americas *had to be* related to some better-known Old World culture.
It’s also a fact that there was contact, and lots of it, unrelated to each other for the most part, and that Columbus went to Iceland to find out about the lands to the west. IOW, to say that either one was all correct and the other was all incorrect is an unsupportable position to take.
‘First Americans’ May Be Johnnies-Come-Lately (Topper Site)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1196832/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/topper/index
https://www.google.com/search?q=22000+years+precolumbian+site%3AFreerepublic.com
Calico: A 200,000-year Old Site In The Americas?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/592435/posts
The film I saw showed no one disputing, but maybe someone did. This was the time Leakey fell off the stage. The film was(I believe) a NAT GEO film from the early 1970s.
I found a stone tool on my place not long ago. it looks just like a small hand axe from Africa. I’ve often wondered if ancient Indians used something like this as it was tear dropped shaped with cutting edges on both sides, and thick at the non pointed end where someone would grasp it.
Darn tootin’.
I loved Tom Dillehay’s response later in the article, and if anyone has a reason to use a term that “street”, it’s him — he was continuously under irrational attack by the Clovis-First-and-Only residue, which grows smaller by the day.
Erectus Ahoy (Stone Age Voyages)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1006058/posts
First Americans - Homo Erectus in America
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1226526/posts
Extinct humans left louse legacy(Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1246930/posts
Rise Of Man Theory ‘Out By 400,000 Years’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1855680/posts
A New Paleolithic Revolution
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1892199/posts
‘Java Man’ takes age to extremes [ H. erectus 550,000 yrs BP? ]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2495263/posts
Ancient hominids may have been seafarers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2428036/posts
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