The physical evidence could make a reasonable person question that.
Posted on 10/05/2023 5:43:13 PM PDT by gnarledmaw
In January 2020, Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, both research geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey, went to New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin at White Sands National Park to see about some footprints. These weren’t just any footprints; the fossilized tracks represent the oldest human footprints in North America. What’s more, Tularosa Basin, about 20,000 years ago, was in the midst of what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). During this chilly, final part of the Pleistocene Era, the global sea level was about 400 feet lower and glaciers covered 25 percent of Earth’s land. Their mission was to find out just how old these footprints were using different dating techniques of biological markers around them.
They were able to complete one method before the pandemic hit. They’d used radiocarbon dating on fossilized impressions of Ruppia cirrhosa seeds, a type of aquatic ditch grass. These seeds had been in the same stratigraphic layer as the footprints, placing them in the same time period.
Then the pandemic rolled in. They couldn’t return to the Basin to collect samples for the other analyses. They went ahead with publishing their results from the Ruppia seeds in a 2021 paper in the journal Science, concluding that the seeds were between 21 and 23,000 years old; therefore, so were the footprints. Not only does this conclusion put an age to footprint fossils, but it alters the suggested timeline of when humans came to North America. According to the paper, if these footprints were 23,000 years old, then humans had entered North America before the LGM ice sheets formed, challenging the notion that humans have only been on the continent for about 15,000 years.
This paper raised controversy, even drawing a comment also published in Science four months later, noting that Ruppia seed fossils aren’t reliable age markers through radiocarbon dating, which analyzes how much the isotope carbon-14 has decayed in organic matter. Aquatic plants can absorb dissolved carbon from the water, which could inflate their radiocarbon-dated age by thousands of years.
Pigati and Springer knew this, which is why their plan all along had been to include two other dating methods. “We knew even at that point that dating aquatic material could be potentially problematic,” Pigati told Inverse. So, they planned to bolster their analysis with dating techniques on two other, distinct specimens. In January 2022, they finished the work they’d set out to do. Today, they publish another paper in Science, showing the analyses they’d intended to do since 2020. This evidence, too, shows that the footprints are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old.
“The bottom line is that people were in what is now southern New Mexico 23,000 years ago,” Springer tells Inverse. “These people had to have been here before the ice sheets closed.”
The new evidence comes from fossilized pollen and some quartz. The pollen skirts the carbon-absorption issue from Ruppia because it comes from terrestrial trees, and can’t suck up dissolved carbon. Radiocarbon dating of pollen seeds from the same layer of earth as the footprints rendered that they, too, were 21 to 23,000 years old. What’s more, these pollen came from conifers, which thrive in colder climes. While there aren’t any conifers where the Tularosa Basin is now, it would’ve been cold enough tens of thousands of years ago.
As for the quartz, Pigati, Springer, and their team performed what’s called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). OSL is based on the buildup of luminescence, or light, properties in quartz crystals. It’s possible to actually see how long it’s been since the crystals last saw sunlight. This, too, corroborated the 21 to 23,000 hypothesis.
“That means that there was enough of a population that sustained itself for people to visit this lake edge over and over and over again and leave their thousands of footprints during that period of time,” Springer says. “So what it does establish is: People were here.”
Another U.S.G.S. research geologist, published a paper this past February in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ways that people reached North America to create this population Springer describes. This further research questions how ancient peoples came to current North America via a coastal route when interior continental paths were blocked with ice sheets.
As for Springer and Pigati, they’ll continue dating White Sands and its surrounding area. “Our focus is on White Sands and telling the story of the context of the footprints,” Springer says.
Where are the people from millions of years? Fossil fuel 🤣🤣🤣
New Mexico parks and government land (which is basically the whole state) were shut down most of the time. Later they were open but insane.
I was hiking with a group of Israelis in the Lincoln forest, no people near and ordered (by a park ranger who looked like he was going to draw his weapon) to put a mask on.
He drove his off road buggy thing over a mile to order us to put masks on and then kept following us at a distance for an hour.
Then the pandemic rolled in. They couldn’t return to the Basin
AYFKM? A site in the middle of not much and you were stymied?
Must be me,,,except for travel to the EU I pretty much went everywhere.
Bkmk
Ice and ocean constraints on early human migrations into North America along the Pacific coast
Abstract
Founding populations of the first Americans likely occupied parts of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The timing, pathways, and modes of their southward transit remain unknown, but blockage of the interior route by North American ice sheets between ~26 and 14 cal kyr BP (ka) favors a coastal route during this period. Using models and paleoceanographic data from the North Pacific, we identify climatically favorable intervals when humans could have plausibly traversed the Cordilleran coastal corridor during the terminal Pleistocene. Model simulations suggest that northward coastal currents strengthened during the LGM and at times of enhanced freshwater input, making southward transit by boat more difficult. Repeated Cordilleran glacial-calving events would have further challenged coastal transit on land and at sea. Following these events, ice-free coastal areas opened and seasonal sea ice was present along the Alaskan margin until at least 15 ka. Given evidence for humans south of the ice sheets by 16 ka and possibly earlier, we posit that early people may have taken advantage of winter sea ice that connected islands and coastal refugia. Marine ice-edge habitats offer a rich food supply and traversing coastal sea ice could have mitigated the difficulty of traveling southward in watercraft or on land over glaciers. We identify 24.5 to 22 ka and 16.4 to 14.8 ka as environmentally favorable time periods for coastal migration, when climate conditions provided both winter sea ice and ice-free summer conditions that facilitated year-round marine resource diversity and multiple modes of mobility along the North Pacific coast.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208738120
The one thing we are certain of is that the first inhabitants came from the west not from the east. So they came from Asia and not from Africa, and definitely not from Europe.
“Nonsense. Recorded history is only six to seven thousand years. Where were these people before that? Extrapolate further to evolutionary postulates that man has been around for at least three million years and we have a problem. What were all these supposed humans doing during that time?
Yet we have a six thousand year history from supposedly living in “caves” to making computers. Where all all the bodies? Millions of years and they could not figure out how to get out of a cave and build a house? Nonsense.”
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There has been such an explosion of advances in the last few thousand years, that it makes me wonder how this ties in with Genesis.
Instead of God creating the entire bodies of Adam and Eve (whether instantly if you take Genesis literally, or slowly over a period of millions of years as the science seems to indicate), perhaps, a few thousand years ago, He just “upgraded” the brains of the existing humans. So we are the result of a 2-step process, not just 1-step.
He just “upgraded” the brains of the existing humans. So we are the result of a 2-step process, not just 1-step.
Could be.
Even many evolutionists have used the idea of slow and gradual change, and then something big happens to give the life-form a change.
See punctuated equilibrium (things are pretty constant for most of the time and then a big change) and the “hopeful monster” theory.
The evolutionists see it happening by chance and environment, but so many mutations have to happen at the same time it points to a Designer.
Genesis is not a science book, but it gives some pretty interesting descriptions of how everything was created which match much of what we see in science. I wonder how many creation stories have humans being made first and then the world is created for them?
The word “day” in the Hebrew can also refer to an “age”. Like “back in the day of the dinosaurs...”
I’m open to most theories when it comes to God’s creation.
Our pastor is along the lines that I think, but he is also open to the idea of actual 24-hour days and gives scripture for that. He said something like “And, while I think the fossil record makes sense the way we commonly understand it, if God wanted to - He could have made the earth LOOK that old from the very beginning. He created Adam “old”, as a full-grown mature adult.” I thought that was an interesting take on it.
Here in the great state of Washington the governor halted all group work on projects until all the workers were vaccinated. Including the volunteer highway litter clean-up. Outside! For TWO YEARS! Most litter programs were re-instated in March, 2022.
“The one thing we are certain of is that the first inhabitants came from the west not from the east.”
But much sooner than thought... In fact I believe in the theory that first man was on the American continent 130,000 years ago. I myself have found Mousterian stone tools in California. But of course this does not fit the narrative.
The physical evidence could make a reasonable person question that.
The Indians were Mongols who walked here before what are now Russia and Alaska separated.
Thanks gnarledmaw!
The park was closed................
That is not known for certain.
Have you ever heard of the Solutrean hypothesis?
One of the biggest arguments against it is that the timeline doesn’t make sense. If we just pushed back the human presence on the continent to >21K then the timeline might make sense.
Everything keeps getting older.
If you want to really blow your mind, look into the theory of how self-awareness evolved in humans.
One theory says before self-awareness evolved, we were like gorillas or monkeys in that we had no ability to know what others were thinking about us or any ability to deceive.
Then through evolution driven by sexual strategy, female humans evolved the ability to deceive males in order to have multiple sexual partners without the male learning about it and killing or abandoning her offspring. Without self awareness, the males would be as easy to deceive as a dog. The female could continually find new, more beneficial sexual partners to pass her genes down while also maintaining the day to day support of her mate.
In this, she would have evolved the ability to differentiate between lies and truth or put another way....”the knowledge of good and evil”.
The theory posits that sometime after females gained this trait, males also gained it.
Some years ago I was talking with a woman in an east Coast bar. She was an anthropologist from California. This was during the time when no one before Clovis was still the general view. She said she was connected with a small group that had found remains they believed were around 200,000 years old and were in trouble for their belief. I wonder if this very old remains info has ever made it into the more general ancient human remains controversy/discussion?
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