Posted on 07/09/2021 9:10:43 AM PDT by blam
New radiocarbon dates for rabbit bones excavated in the 1960s at Mexico’s Coxcatlan Cave (shown here) raise the possibility that humans lived there roughly 30,000 years ago.
Andrew D. Somerville
Humans may have inhabited what’s now southern Mexico surprisingly early, between 33,448 and 28,279 years ago, researchers say.
If so, those people arrived more than 10,000 years before folks often tagged as the first Americans (SN: 7/11/18). Other preliminary evidence puts humans in central Mexico as early as around 33,000 years ago (SN: 7/22/20).
The latest evidence comes from animal bones that biological anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Somerville and two Mexican colleagues found stored in a Mexico City lab. The bones had been excavated in the 1960s at a rock-shelter called Coxcatlan Cave.
Radiocarbon analyses of six rabbit bones from the site’s deepest sediment yielded unexpectedly old ages, the researchers report online May 19 in Latin American Antiquity. That sediment also contained chipped and sharp-edged stones regarded as tools by the site’s lead excavator.
Higher sediment layers yielded clearer examples of stone tools and other remnants of human activity dating to nearly 9,900 years ago. Somerville, of Iowa State University in Ames, initially suspected that rabbit bones from the deepest sediment were perhaps around 12,000 years old. But analyses revealed they were much older, hinting humans were living in the cave roughly 30,000 years ago.
Somerville will next determine whether other animal bones from the ancient sediment display butchery marks, breaks where marrow was removed or burned patches from cooking. He also wants to locate and study possible stone tools from that same sediment that may be stored in the same lab.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
GGG Ping.
Well, when you leave early, you arrive early.
The down side - there’s nothing to do.
I thought they were indigenous.
So, not “stolen land” people have been coming here for 30k years. Is guy #2 the first thief? How can we figure out who owns the land? Oh my the SJW’s can’t ignore the SCIENCE can they? How to use this to make leftist heads explode. Hahahaha
But wait...I thought the earth was only 6,000 years ago.
And then some think nothing happened in the Americas until people came over from Asia.
The earth is really old. It just seems ridiculous to think that people only lived in few places. Why wouldn’t they have lived in North America?
Perhaps...just perhaps, something happened that drove people out of North America. //Sarcasm
I believe the big debate is now on how they moved through North and South America. The older view had them using the Bering Land Bridge and basically walking all the way to Tierra del Fuego.
A newer idea is that they did a lot of moving by boat. Some very old sites exist in Chile, which should be one of the last places to be settled if they walked. Also interesting is the fact that even today, it is virtually impossible to walk to South America from North America.
It is not very difficult to hike the Darien Gap. It can be done in a few days.
The difficulty is in not having fun confrontations with guerillas and drug runners.
The first Starbucks
It’s not even a secret that stone age Europeans were here before the Indians. Who knows about before that. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter and everyone should be under the same rules as everyone else. No special treatment for anyone, just the same Constitution as the rest of the place.
And then the “Native Americans” came and slaughtered them.
Also interesting is the fact that even today, it is virtually impossible to walk to South America from North America.
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30,000 years ago the sea level was about 400 feet lower because much of the water was tied up then Ice Age glaciers.
Interesting, but remember this article is a press release, not a peer reviewed scientific paper. Lots of hoops to jump through before this will be recognized within the field and some of their colleagues will continue to insist that there were no people in the Americas prior to Clovis.
I think that the evidence is becoming pretty convincing. I’m backing Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian in this sweepstakes. The First Americans crossed the Atlantic and or the Bering Sea/Pacific following the ice verges and preceded the ice free corridor Asians by several thousands of years.
If there was a migration through an ice free corridor, the ice margins folks came first.
Hmmmm.... my family helped build the Panama Canal and it was never a bother to cross the isthmus of panama between north and south America.
So wth are you talking about?
As early as 75,000 years ago. That fact is well hidden so as not to upset certain indigenous people.
I know it’s a bit buried, but it just shouldn’t matter, should be the same boat for all.
Here in western Canada, it’s getting hazardous to be white, with all the bodies they found, they want scapegoats now. They’ve been burning churches and pulling statues down and vandalizing them as well. Nobody does anything about it.
Hardly anyone’s oldest ancestors were “indigenous” to where their own generations closest to them have lived. But all folks are “indigenous” to the earth.
And as far as the “Latin” cultures of Mexico and South America, as much as they may contain descendants of persons who predated the Spanish in those lands, the post-Spanish-conquest societies are offshoots of the Spanish conquests which subdued all the “indigenous” societies, and in that sense are no more “native” societies than the other European dominated societies of North America.
Lastly (while I am ranting), neither the society of the Mextecs, nor the Aztecs had a social standing and power more than 200 miles north of Mexico City, beyond ancient trade connections and possible ancient connections to ancient tribes of North America - all of whom fought the Aztecs and later the Spanish. The “Latin” culture and the “Mexicans” it brought with it, north of the Rio Grand, dates to the Spanish conquests and not earlier.
You won’t find Mextec or Aztec tribal names in this list of “indigenous” tribes of Texas, for instance.
http://www.native-languages.org/texas.htm
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