Thanks Bernard. Winds may blow ash around, but they don’t work worth a dang on stone artifacts, and this one was under the ash, hence it antedates the ash, unless one wants to posit ash that blows around for three or four thousand years. And the stone still had traces of blood.
> extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
That’s an old Saganism, it just meant that Carl classified anything he didn’t already believe as an extraordinary claim. In fact, AFAIC, that particular Saganism is literally the only extraordinary claim ever made, apart from “the debate is over”.
Prior to radiocarbon dating, it was extraordinary to claim that artifacts in the Americas were older than 3000 years — even though that was starting to change, it took RC dating to finally pull out the rug. Science progresses just like one funeral following another.
But the new floor was about 9,000 years, and then later 11,000 years (Atlantis age, ironically enough).
Now that has increased to perhaps 14,000 years — that’s the conventional low chronology that has been retroactively applied to Meadowcroft and Monte Verde.
It remains mysterious (koff koff) that a single group of a few thousand, or some say only a few hundred, prehistoric hunters managed to stampede across Beringia during a short window when it could still be reached on foot, but before it flooded, and then waited around for some generations until the glaciers melted and they could explode across the 10,000 mile length of two continents, arriving everywhere at once.
And all during those millennia, they were completely alone and undisturbed by anyone else. :’)
I was an archaeologist for 35 years and worked in New Mexico for 20 years. The Oregon environmental setting mentioned is similar to desert, aeolian settings on which I worked in NM. I have personally documented wind mixed matricies of artifact materials of different temporalities. We also had success in obtaining blood hemoglobin samples from stone tools that were exposed on the surface in dunal, aeolian situations.
Winds in that part of Oregan as well as in the desert Southwest typically blow 35 to 50 mph from early Spring to early summer. Part of my research methodology questioned whether blood hemoglobin would remain on stone artifacts after centuries of sand blasting. I was surprised that it did! As far as I know, I was the first to use blood hemoglobin analysis in New Mexico.