University of Texas at Austin researcher says the first Americans arrived earlier than previo

About 12,000 years ago, prehistoric humans walked out of Siberia, trekked across the Bering land bridge and down an ice-free corridor into inner North America, where they hunted Ice Age elephants and peopled the new world.

But mounting evidence is slowly turning that story to fiction, said Michael Collins, an archaeologist with the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more than 20 years, Collins and other scientists have been digging up artifacts from Chile to Texas that convince them the first Americans didn't walk here at all, but came by boat, and arrived much earlier than previously thought.

"This has been hotly debated," Collins said. "That theory has held sway for 70 years or so. But a few of us for the last 25 years have come to seriously doubt that theory."

Collins is in San Antonio today to talk about the shifting debate over the first Americans. Collins and archaeologist Robert Ricklis, who excavated a 7,000-year-old cemetery near Victoria, will speak at a Southern Texas Archaeological Association meeting at the University of the Incarnate Word. The meeting is open to the public.

For decades, the first Americans were thought to be the Clovis people, named after a site in Clovis, N.M., where 11,000-year-old fluted points were found in the 1930s. Since then, Collins said, other sites in Pennsylvania, Chile and Virginia have yielded older finds.

Collins first became convinced of "pre-Clovis" ancestors in 1967, after discovering burned mammal bones with butcher marks at a site called Cueva Quebrada in Val Verde County. Carbon dating of charcoal put the bones at 14,000 years old. To this day, most other scientists have ignored those findings, Collins said.

In the 1970s, Collins worked on a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde, which contained artifacts at least 1,000 years older than those at the Clovis sites. At first, many scientists attacked the validity of the evidence and clung to the theory that the Clovis people arrived first, Collins said. Over time, they began to accept the site and the tide of opinion turned, he said.

"I spent 20 years of my life being beat up over that project, as did everyone else," Collins said. "It has finally, begrudgingly, earned the support of a significant majority of archaeologists."

"It's really a case of stay tuned," Collins said. Theories have been proffered, but none universally accepted, he said.

Collins himself believes America was likely peopled on two fronts. Coastal communities in both Asia and Europe likely made their way to the New World on boats, sticking close to ice shelves to fish and hunt sea mammals. Though no ancient boats have been found, Collins points to evidence that Asians traveled to Australia 50,000 years ago, presumably in boats, since the island continent has never been connected to a land mass.

Collins also points to evidence from Japan that suggests prehistoric humans 30,000 years ago ate deep-sea fish and possessed obsidian found only on distant Japanese islands, which also suggests the use of boats.

Though this far-flung evidence interests Collins, his efforts to debunk the Clovis-first theory are closer to home.

For the past several years, he has led work at the Gault site, a large Clovis campsite midway between Georgetown and Fort Hood. A rich bounty of evidence at Gault suggests the Clovis people were not highly mobile hunters, as previously thought. It's more likely they were somewhat settled hunter-gatherers who occasionally felled a mammoth, but lived mostly on plants and smaller game such as frogs, turtles and birds.

"(Gault) is the poster child for Clovis not fitting the theoretical model," Collins said.

Thanks.

Trade carried various things like copper and unusual stones, and those are found in contexts that show just that. The lack of perishable items in old sites is likely due to their decomposition. Same goes for bones. Human remains are especially scarce in the Americas, so it shouldn't be a surprise that horse remains are.

When horse bones (or petroglyphs) have been found, they have been used as diagnostic of post-Columbian date for the other remains -- but that's not a sound idea, based as it is on the assumption that horses were reintroduced.

Anyway, here's some more folklore, which purports to show (or can easily be purported to show) conclusively that the tribal cultures were altered by Euro-meddling:

Spanish Colonial Horse and the Plains Indian Culture
by O. Ned Eddins
http://www.thefurtrapper.com/indian_horse.htm

...Francis Haines states that by the early seventeen hundreds all the tribes south of the Platte had some familiarity with horses. Pierre Gaultier de La Verendrye a French trader reached the Mandan village on the Missouri River in 1738, while there he heard of Indians to the south that had a few horses. George Hyde estimated that 1760 was the period the Teton Sioux acquired horses from Arikara. In 1768, Jonathan Carver found no horses among the Dakota Sioux of upper Missouri, but two years later the Yankton Sioux had horses... It was the Spanish horse that made it possible for the American Indians to move onto the Plains and become truly nomadic. The individual, not the tribe, owned the horses. This produced a class system based on ownership of horses -- those with and those without. Horses spread through the Arikara to the Missouri River villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa and eventually to the Sioux and the Cheyenne. When the first white traders reached the Plains none of the Indians North and East of the Black Hills had horses. By the end of the seventeen hundreds, the Indian horse had reached most of the Rocky Mountains and Plains Indians. An extensive Indian trade network existed between the Indian tribes decades before explorers and fur traders reached the Missouri River villages.

Introduction to the Ute Tribal History
http://www.southern-ute.nsn.us/history/intro.html

Possession of horses allowed the Utes to begin buffalo hunting on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and the buffalo soon became one of their main resources, because it would provide them with many useful products: e.g., meat for food (one wouldn't have to work so hard gathering food); hides for tipi covers, blankets, clothing, moccasins, and bags of all kinds; sinew thread for sewing and for bowstrings; horn and hoof glue for many purposes. And with the horse, the Utes could more easily evade their enemies, transport their goods to a central camp where the women and children were protected, and range farther to hunt for food.

The impact of wild horses on the Native American people
http://www.indians.org/articles/wild-horses.html

For the Native Americans who revered the wild horses, they took great care in capturing and training them for practical uses, always mindful of the horses’ role in the spirit world. With the introduction of the wild horses, their culture and way of life broaden dramatically. Now, the Native Indians could hunt for buffalo and other food more easily. They could trade and barter with other tribes and even increase their claim of land.

The Coso Painted Style (Pictographs)
By Alan Garfinkel Ph.C.
http://www.petroglyphs.us/article_the_Coso_Painted_Style_pictographs.htm

An exceptionally harsh winter of 1861-1862 led to potential starvation by the Native peoples of eastern California. Much of the area had already been deforested to supply timber and charcoal for the mines. The timbers were harvested from the substantial stands of pinyon trees that would normally have provided significant nut crops in the fall. With their traditional subsistence practices in disarray, Native peoples began raiding Euroamerican cattle and horses. It was during this period that depredations began and Native peoples murdered White settlers in considerable numbers.

Petroglyphs of a horse (above) and man (below) at Picture Canyon
http://www.ou.edu/okage/lodgepole2/Day4Petroglyph.jpg
http://www.ou.edu/okage/lodgepole2/journal4.html

"The scientist in charge accused the local towns people of carving the footprints and covering them back up! BWAHAHA!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you are referring to the "man tracks" in the limestone of the Paluxy river bed near Glen Rose, Texas, that is exactly what happened.

The locals (notably "Bull" Adams and his brother) were the first, to carve "Man Tracks" -- as a tourist attraction. BUT...I, personally, caught the "Eminent Creation Scientist" who later built a (money-making) "Creation Museum" near the site -- in the act of carving (and photographing) "Giant Man Tracks".

Not only were they freshly-carved, the biggest was carved (for photography purposes) in soft mud! The phony "scientist" even put up a pre-cast plaque on a nearby rock touting his "Bauanthropus Erectus" "find". (BTW, he was 'humble' -- his name is "Baugh"...)

FYI, my wife lives in Glen Rose, and it was her father who used his tracked loader to lift limestone slabs so this bogus "Creation Scientist" could "prove" that "Man Walked With the Dinosaurs". After I splashed the water out of a "man track" (atop an otherwise dry slab -- in the middle of a drought) and showed him the fresh chisel marks, he began to doubt the "Creationist"'s veracity.

And, when I borrowed his knife and stuck it up to the hilt in the mud-carved "track", he walked away in disgust, saying,

"The God Who created this universe doesn't need the 'help' of liars and fakers to 'prove' that His Word is true!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Man never "walked with dinosaurs".

Don't forget the Nez Perce and the appaloosa horses.

Trivia:

The Nez Perce Indians of the inland Northwest deserve much of the credit for the Appaloosa horses we have today. As the only Native Americans known to selectively breed their horses, the Nez Perce desired only the strongest, fastest and most sure-footed of mounts. The influx of white settlers to the Northwest changed the Nez Perce’s destiny and nearly destroyed the legacy of their horse-breeding efforts.
While the Nez Perce never called their spotted horses "Appaloosas," the breed’s name comes from either the Palouse River, which flows through the region of eastern Washington and north Idaho where the horses were known to be plentiful or from the Palouse Tribe, whose main village was situated on the Palouse River. White settlers first described the colorful native mounts as "a Palouse horse," which was soon slurred to "Appalousey." The name "Appaloosa" was officially adopted in 1938. Source

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