DARYL P. MILLER/ UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
DIGGING DEEPER: At the Topper site in South Carolina, artifacts have been found more than six feet below the level of the Clovis, thought to be the first Americans.
Posted on 11/17/2004 10:04:06 PM PST by SunkenCiv
University of South Carolina archeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River. Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation. "It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned." ...Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnews.canoe.ca ...
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more on Al Goodyear:
'First Americans' May Be Johnnies-Come-Lately (Topper Site)
Atlanta Journal Constitution ^ | 8-20-2004 | Mike Toner
Posted on 08/22/2004 8:17:24 AM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1196832/posts
It was TahRayZuh!
FGS
It is not human. It's Sasquatch.:)
The Christian Science Monitor - November 18, 2004
First Americans may have crossed Atlantic 50,000 years ago
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1118/p01s02-usgn.html
In a discovery sure to set off a firestorm of debate over human migration to the western hemisphere, archaeologists in South Carolina say they have uncovered evidence that people lived in eastern North America at least 50,000 years ago - far earlier than any previously known human presence.
If the results hold up, this could spur some significant rewriting of early human history. It adds to a growing body of evidence that human colonization of the Western Hemisphere is a more complicated - and much older - story than one involving simply a land bridge from Asia.
Cracks in that theory had already begun to appear in recent years. But the new evidence - in the form of stone tools buried deep in the South Carolina countryside - could be the most credible and provocative yet. Coupled with other finds, it promises to spur inquiry into the possibility the hemisphere's first humans may have come from Europe or Africa.
This could also put human migration to the Americas on the same time footing as human movement out of Africa and into Australia and Central Asia.
Lead archeologist Al Goodyear concedes that the findings of his group won't be accepted without debate. "I expect outright rejection of these results," he said in an interview. But he still asserts that the find is "the real deal."
The University of South Carolina archaeologist and his team uncovered what they interpret as simple stone tools in a layer of soil far below previous layers dated to about 16,000 years ago. "The geology and the [radiocarbon] dates are solid" for the layer in which the simple flake tools and coring tools were found.
The dating of the artifacts to some 50,000 years ago, announced at a press conference Wednesday at the university, comes at a period in North American archaeology when researchers are still smarting from bruising battles over evidence that humans arrived several thousand years earlier than the so-called Clovis culture, whose artifacts date to between 10,800 and 11,500 years ago.
"This is an interesting piece of information," says Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "It really needs to be compared against other available evidence. Even people with open minds will hesitate on 50,000 years."
Part of a larger story
Yet the South Carolina team's find is not alone in its antiquity - dates which begin to push the radiocarbon-dating techniques used to their limits. One site in Oklahoma has been dated to between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago. Brazilian and European archaeologists are working a site in Brazil that they say dates to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. And a site in Chile has yielded artifacts dating to 33,000 years ago. In all cases, however, the evidence has been controversial.
Researchers interested in the origins of native Americans once held that the first Americans crossed a land bridge between Siberia and North America, then down into the "lower 48" through a corridor in the glaciers in the last ice age.
The idea evolved after unique spear points were discovered in Colorado and New Mexico, near Clovis in the 1930s. Once people knew what to look for, Clovis spear points began to appear throughout North America at what have been interpreted as quarries and kill sites where hunters had brought down their Pleistocene prey. Scientists applied radiocarbon dating techniques to organic material found in the same soil layers as the spear points and found them to be between 10,800 and 11,500 years old.
Yet several lines of argument and evidence have chipped away at the foundations of the Clovis culture as the earliest Americans, according Dr. Dillehay.
He notes that so far researchers have failed to find sites in Siberia with primitive hunting technologies similar to those of Clovis people. Only one or two Clovis habitation sites have been found, so little if anything is known about the culture's lifestyle. As with Goodyear's site, researchers have unearthed artifacts at eastern US sites that predate Clovis.
Genetic diversity in the Americas
A Clovis-first approach fails to explain significantly older sites in Central and South America. And while genetic similarities between modern native Americans and Asiatic people have been documented, the high level of genetic diversity seen in native Americans "is difficult to explain in a Clovis time frame. It points to a deeper time."
These elements have undermined the Clovis-first theory sufficiently that now many researchers are open to the possibility that, like modern immigrants, people came at different times and from different parts of the globe - including Africa, Asia, Australia, and perhaps Europe. Indeed, most of the known Clovis sites are found in the eastern US. Some researchers have suggested that spear points found on the East Coast bear a striking resemblance to points found in Europe, raising the possibility that Stone Age Solutrean culture from what is now southwestern France may have made their way west.
"The vast majority of North American archaeologists have become convinced that Clovis doesn't explain the origins of the first people in the Americas," says Dr. Dillehay, whose work on a 13,000-year-old Monte Verde site in Chile was instrumental in turning the intellectual tide.
Goodyear and others agree a key point of contention will be whether the newly dated tools are human-made. Most Clovis-era tools, and even pre-Clovis artifacts, are worked on both sides of the rock. The Topper artifacts are flaked only on one side. Goodyear and others say that based on past experience, they are convinced that the artifacts were crafted with human hands. Critics are likely to view them as ambiguous, possibly nothing more than naturally chipped rocks.
In 1998, Goodyear dug below the level where Clovis artifacts were found and found odd stone tools up to 1 meter deeper. The soils in the layer were dated to 16,000 years ago. Last year, the team dug even deeper and found tools, as well as charred vegetation they could used for radiocarbon dating. The samples were recovered at the site and prepared by Tom Stafford of Stafford Laboratories in Boulder, Colo. The widely respected specialist then sent the samples to the University of California at Irvine for dating.
The resulting dates of up to 51,700 years old are minimum ages.
...or Helen Thomas...
I'm sure he still gets "tired" of the detractors. However, his enthusiasm seems to remain lighter than air. ;')
...or maybe time travelers... ;')
DIGGING DEEPER: At the Topper site in South Carolina, artifacts have been found more than six feet below the level of the Clovis, thought to be the first Americans.
A Clovis-first approach fails to explain significantly older sites in Central and South America... now many researchers are open to the possibility that, like modern immigrants, people came at different times and from different parts of the globe - including Africa, Asia, Australia, and perhaps Europe.And all it took was a bludgeoning over the head. ;')
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Signs of an earlier American
The Christian Science Monitor - September 23, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0923/p13s01-stgn.html
Al Goodyear is holding his breath in anticipation. Within days, the affable archaeologist expects to read the results of lab tests indicating that stone tools he recently found in South Carolina are 25,000 years old - or older.
Such results would be explosive. They would imply that humans lived on this continent before the last ice age, far earlier than previously believed. Even if the dates came in younger than 25,000 years old, researchers say, the find would add to the mounting body of evidence that humans trod North and South America at least 2,000 years before the earliest-known inhabitants, known as the Clovis culture.
Dr. Goodyear's efforts are among the latest from a growing group of archaeologists and anthropologists who have become emboldened to buck conventional wisdom and probe far deeper into the hemisphere's past than many of their predecessors did. What they are finding not only could rewrite old chapters in the history of two continents, it could write new ones.
"With all these new discoveries, it's almost a rebirth of excitement in the field. All sorts of new ideas are coming forward about migration routes and timing of arrival," says Michael Waters, a geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University who is involved in several pre-Clovis digs around the United States. "You still have to be careful. Every claim of pre-Clovis occupation needs to be looked at quite carefully."
And they are. When stunning discoveries surface in North America's paleolithic past, they can ignite debates conducted with all the gentility of the Stanley Cup finals - as Goodyear knows.
"When these dates come back, I'll be hiding in a coal mine. I've already got a little Groucho Marx disguise I'm going to put on," quips the University of South Carolina scientist, who along with colleagues is working what's called the Topper site in Allendale County, S.C., along the Savannah River.
For decades, the Clovis culture has held sway as the oldest in the New World. Evidence for this group's presence was first unearthed in 1936 near Clovis, N.M. A second site that emerged in Arizona in 1959, and others since. A uniquely fluted spear point became the culture's icon. Radiocarbon dating at Clovis sites so far has bracketed their presence from roughly 11,200 to around 10,800 radiocarbon years ago. (Archaeologists prefer expressing dates in radiocarbon years because converting to modern calendar years becomes tricky beyond a certain age threshold.)
Searching for Big Foot
As evidence for the Clovis culture's presence cropped up throughout the continent and the sites became the subject of intense study, the notion that Clovis people were the oldest immigrants to the Western Hemisphere became firmly entrenched. Although some research teams periodically claimed to have found older sites, their evidence was shaky or later proved to have a less radical explanation. To claim a pre-Clovis find was akin to claiming to spot Big Foot.
Researchers often hesitated "to dig below the Clovis horizon for fear of ridicule," Dr. Waters says.
By many accounts, the turning point came seven years ago when anthropologist Tom Dillehay published the second of two encyclopedic volumes of results from a site in southern Chile known as Monte Verde. His team's evidence pointed to a human presence there 13,000 years ago. Other sites began to appear with evidence for pre-Clovis occupation that many saw as more credible than evidence from earlier efforts.
One of these sites, known as Mud Lake, sits near Kenosha, Wis. It was discovered by accident in January 1936, the same year as the first find of a Clovis point, when a Works Progress Administration crew was digging a drainage ditch and unearthed most of a foreleg from a juvenile mammoth. Turned over to the Kenosha Historical Society, it sat there until 1990, when an amateur archaeologist noted cut marks on the bones. Bones from nearby sites, known as the Fenske and Shaefer sites, showed similar markings. In 1992 and 1993, researchers excavated Shaefer and found bones with cut marks on them and stone tools underneath a pelvis bone. Radiocarbon dates on the bones and on plant material at the same level of the dig ranged from 12,500 to 12,300 years ago, nudging them beyond the Clovis time scale.
Dates from the Mud Lake bone were more stunning, says Dan Joyce, senior curator at the Kenosha Public Museum. Purported hunters slew the mammoth 13,450 years ago. He remains cautious about the presence of hunters. Cut marks are suggestive, but not conclusive. This past August, he and his team searched for the rest of their mammoth. But so far it has remained elusive enough to earn the beast the sobriquet Waldo, after the children's "Where's Waldo?" series.
While Dr. Joyce and his colleagues were planning their hunt for Waldo, Goodyear was taking a deeper look at Topper, a site he had been studying for 20 years. An adherent to the Clovis-first idea, he began to rethink his position after reading a site report from Cactus Hill, a pre-Clovis site in Virginia, in 1998.
His subsequent work at Topper uncovered what looked to be industrial-scale toolmaking well below the level at which Clovis artifacts were found. With no organic material available to radiocarbon-date the level, the team had to use a different technique that stunned them with date estimates of 16,000 to 20,000 years ago.
In May, he took his crew back to Topper for another, deeper look. They found what they interpret as tools in a layer roughly two meters (6.5 feet) below their earlier pre-Clovis finds. The soils and geology suggest that the artifacts are several thousand years older, he says. But nothing beats radiocarbon dates. Fortuitously, they found a sample of wood charcoal to derive three radiocarbon dates.
"I'd be very surprised if they're less than 25,000 years old, but I'm preparing myself mentally for the possibility that they could be a lot older," perhaps as old as 30,000 or 40,000 years, he says.
Such finds raise intriguing questions. Clovis groups were thought to have crossed a broad land bridge across the Bering Strait, hiking through breaks in the glaciers to what is now the lower 48. But if people lived on the continent at least 2,000 years earlier, they would have arrived at a time when the glaciers were impassable. This has led some to argue for a sea route along the land bridge and then the western coastline. Others suggest some may have come from Australia or the Iberian peninsula.
But is it civilization?
Not everyone is convinced by the evidence so far for pre-Clovis finds, although some doubters don't rule out the possibility that some groups where here earlier.
"The tools people find are not self-evidently hunting or butchering tools" in the way Clovis artifacts are, says Stuart Fiedel, an archaeologist with the Louis Berger Group in Washington, D.C.
Like Vikings making landfall in North America before any other modern European group, pre-Clovis sites don't seem to represent the first long-term colonization of the Western Hemisphere, he says. Interest in Clovis grew out of their apparent role as a continent-wide colonizing population and a key to the origins of the native Americans Europeans encountered after they arrived.
But others see potentially deeper insights coming from pre-Clovis finds.
"This could help us get a better handle on the amount of genetic variability we see in the descendants of these populations," says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It also could reset the clock for the development of civilizations in the New World.
Grounded in a deeply held confidence I'd wager. This is a really neat find in what is essentially in our own back yard. The old theories will continue to fall one by one. Just how far back will the bone diggers find evidence of civilization is the question. 15,000 YA to 50,000 YA is quite a jump, but if I were a betting man I'd bet they will eventually find evidence older than that. Call it a hunch. Since I don't really have anything else to base it on ;^)
FGS
I guess my blimp joke went over like a lead- uh, forget it. ;')
My view is that humans have been in the Americas for a very long time, and remains will be found pretty much as deep as anyone cares to keep digging. Problem is, the preservation of remains is rare, as shown by the vanishing of much more recent remains, like, say, my great-great-grandmother.
If I had to guess, I'd say the Barringer impact ("Meteor Crater") had negative consequences on North American inhabitants (and animal species) over a wide area, perhaps opening the door a bit for a more recent wave, or more than one. Also, glaciation dropped global sealevel, meaning that plenty of potential sites are now part of the continental shelf and submerged.
More to the point, the water's edge was lower altitude, and all other things being equal, the lower the altitude, the warmer the climate. Getting to the Americas from Europe or eastern Asia (or vice versa) by boat was probably commonplace, and probably happened more than once.
:')
Well, you know how it is; you gotta draw a picture for we Nenaderthals ;^)
And yeah, it sounds like a needle in a haystack sorta thing, which I suppose explains so many "accidental" finds.
Do you know right off hand what length the average glacial cycles runs. Seems like ~20,000 years??? In any event, I would expect much of ancient civilizations would be near a coast AND fresh water both. And there would be some movement inland by a few "explorers", again staying near fresh water sources over hundreds maybe thousands of years. So yeah, it would seem there is probably a trove of artifacts....under water.....near river mouths?
great-great grandmother, eh?
FGS
LOL. I was ridiculed here four years ago when I ask the question, "I wonder how many humans were killed from the Barringer Impact?"
A less 'crazy' question these days, it seems.
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