Posted on 03/24/2008 2:14:57 PM PDT by blam
Bison bones bolster idea Ice Age seafarers first to Americas
Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, March 24, 2008
Head of a bison, part of a series of ancient bison bones found on Vancouver Island and nearby Orcas Island in Washington state.
A series of discoveries of ancient bison bones on Vancouver Island and nearby Orcas Island in Washington state is fuelling excitement among researchers that the Pacific coast offered a food-rich ecosystem for Ice Age hunters some 14,000 years ago -- much earlier than the prevailing scientific theory pegs the arrival of humans to the New World.
Fourteen separate finds of remains of the extinct species bison antiquus -- an ancestor of the plains buffalo that would become a staple much later for Midwest natives -- show the islands were once part of a coastal grassland refuge from the glaciers that enveloped the rest of Canada and the northern U.S. at that time.
And among the relics found in areas including the Saanich Peninsula is a particularly tantalizing piece of evidence: a leg bone from Orcas Island that appears to have been butchered by a human -- hundreds of years before humans were thought to have migrated to North America.
The bison-bone bonanza is to be highlighted at a major international archeological conference this week in Vancouver. The event follows the publication of a U.S. study earlier this month in the journal Science that proposed a new "working model" for when and how ancient humans first spread from northeast Asia to the northwest corner of the Americas.
That study -- along with the bison finds and a growing number of other archeological sites suggesting an earlier arrival for humans to this hemisphere -- adds credence to a controversial theory that ancient seafarers, travelling by boat along the ice-fringed B.C. coast, launched the peopling of the New World about 15,000 years ago.
The Vancouver and Orcas islands discoveries also indicate that these pioneering hunters could have relied on much more than seafood to subsist in their new North American home, argues Michael Wilson, an archeologist at B.C.'s Douglas College.
He is the co-author with U.S. archeologists Steve Kenady and Randall Schalk of several new studies detailing the bison-bone sites.
Wilson says the "breakage patterns" on the bison leg bone from Orcas Island are "certainly consistent with documented human butchering patterns but are not by themselves ‘proof'" that humans killed and ate the animal.
"The Orcas and Vancouver Island finds are evidence for the existence of a land-based mammal dispersal corridor from the mainland to the islands at that time," he told Canwest News Service. "We provide a reasonable alternative to the model that suggested a coastal adaptation and use of sea mammal, mollusk and fish resources."
Mr. Wilson describes a Pacific shore much different than it is today, with Vancouver Island nearly attached to the mainland because of lower sea levels.
"People coming down the coast could have been doing the coastal equivalent of island-hopping," he says. "We are not envisioning a coastline bordered by towering walls of well-established ice. Conditions were highly variable along the coast and I think that there were some significant open areas. Early travellers were familiar with such environments in areas to the north, so this was nothing new."
Whether based on seafood or bison meat, the picture of shoreline hunters sketched out in the emergent "coastal migration" theory challenges a long-held view that the earliest newcomers to North America were big-game hunters who arrived about 12,500 years ago from Siberia, pursuing mammoths and other ice age prey across the dried-up Bering Strait to Alaska and Yukon, and eventually into the warmer continental interior through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains.
These hunters used a distinctive spear-tip known as a Clovis point to kill their prey, and Clovis archeological finds throughout North America show there was a rapid spread of these people and their hunting technology once the glaciers began disappearing around 10,000 B.C.
But the "Clovis First" theory has increasingly come under fire from critics who point to numerous archeological sites in both North and South America that appear to have human artifacts from well before 13,000 years ago.
The U.S. team writing in Science, headed by Texas A&M University anthropologist Ted Goebel, concluded that both the coastal and ice-free corridor migrations probably occurred. But their study tilts the crucial matter of identifying the "first" wave of North Americans toward the coastal migrants, and sets the date of that arrival back about 2,000 years before the Clovis hunters reached this continent.
"If this is the time of colonization, geological data from Western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently de-glaciated Pacific coastline," the team asserted in its Science study. "The first Americans used boats, and the coastal corridor would have been the likely route of passage, since the interior corridor appears to have remained closed for at least another 1,000 years."
Archaeologist Dennis Sanford believes the Clovis Point makers were from Europe and the survivors from the catastrophe in 12,900 began making the Folsom point because all the big mammals were dead and Clovis points weren't needed.
GGG Ping.
Cool!
Got this off another thread (Thanks to gleeaikin)
“The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes”, Firestone, et al., 2006, hypothesizes a 300 mile diameter snowball crashing into what became Hudson Bay about 13,000 years ago, destroying the Clovis Indian culture, decimating the large mammal population, and precipitating the 1,000 years of cold called the Younger Dryas.”
Very interesting and informative program.
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Thanks Blam. Looks like a GREAT start to another week of GGG! |
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That was a very up to date program and contained the most up to date information and theories...I do recommend viewing it. One of the scientists was the author of this article: Immigrants From The Other Side (Clovis Is Solutrean?)
Read Firestone here:
Comet Theory Collides With Clovis Research, May Explain Disappearance of Ancient People
ping
Wasn’t the ocean level lower during the period of initial migration? I’ve heard that mentioned from several sources but I’m not a sciencer so no real clue what’s valid or not.
If it is true, then all this back and forth about when and how in the migration is just the yammering of prancing dilettantes. If archaeologists wont go to where the evidence is, then they’re just pretending to be sciencers.
Yes. That is why there was land between Siberian and Alaska, where now there is the Bering Straight. Sea levels were lower by some 400+ feet at the height of the last ice age.
If it is true, then all this back and forth about when and how in the migration is just the yammering of prancing dilettantes. If archaeologists wont go to where the evidence is, then they’re just pretending to be sciencers.
False. (I am a "sciencer" so I do have a clue).
The standard theory of human migration to the Americas has involved the land bridge. As research progressed, and dating became more accurate, the date of that land bridge grew younger, while the dates of archaeological sites in South American grew older. Pretty soon these two events merged, showing that there had to be other sources of humans coming into the Americas.
The early coastal migration is one such source; people came from the vicinity of Alaska and traveled down the west coasts of both North and South America before the poor folks trudging through Canada got very far. The current discussions of Clovis and connections to Europe are still another possibility for migration to the east coast. And there are other possibilities as well.
As far as "yammering of prancing dilettantes," "if archaeologists wont go to where the evidence is," and "they’re just pretending to be sciencers" -- I strongly suggest you put a cork in it. I have been a professional archaeologist for a lot of years and we're doing the best we can.
But if you think you can do better, get out there and do something. Maybe you could be a "sciencer" someday too!
I saw that. Very interesting.
Nope. I’ll never be a scientist. And, for exactly the reasons you point out in replying to my comment. I’m way too impatient, not willing to dig deeply into background info, etc etc.
Now, an attempt at a serious question...
If the land bridge was a result of the massive ice caps, how did those traveling across reach the land bridge through the ice fields?
The question comes from vague recollections of descriptions of the ice fields extending all the way down to the current New York city area in the North America region. Also, some about the ice fields being massive enough to gouge out the great lakes basins.
Was that a different ice age? Or did I get wires crossed somewhere?
The question comes from vague recollections of descriptions of the ice fields extending all the way down to the current New York city area in the North America region. Also, some about the ice fields being massive enough to gouge out the great lakes basins.
You are correct about the ice fields. But folks were already in Alaska some 30,000 or so years ago, before the heaviest ice. Some areas of Alaska or "Beringia" were not covered with ice, so people survived. Then, near the end of the last ice age there opened up a corridor between Alaska and the continental US. This is what allowed the land migration to take place while there was still a lot of ice around elsewhere.
Starting about the same time folks headed down the coast in watercraft. They were a lot quicker, but that migration didn't get too far inland.
Most of my concept and/or understanding comes from Discovery type “science” programming, so please, don’t hesitate to laugh out loud where appropriate...
But, in regards to the reasoning for not moving inland much distance during the boat migration, I had seen a program that said that was due, probably, to the mega-fauna such as what they called the “God Bear”, the saber tooth cat, and the dire wolf. Is there anything to that? Or was it the usual over simplified “for tv” stuff that often gets put out?
Also, is there any real solid evidence to a land bridge migration? I would assume that the mammoth and such type critters being distributed on both sides of the water would indicate such a thing, but has anything been discovered that pegs it as a certainty?
And, for general comm purposes:
Sciencer = Bureaucrat. Science is a job that requires no boat rocking and never indulges in consensus bucking.
Sciencian = Fundamental worshiper of the image of science. No questions asked. Devotion to whomever dominates in the academic cult of personality.
Scientist = the people that make it work and all too often get passed over in credit and reward for Sciencers and Sciencians.
Other than that, I was just being my usual snarky self. I like science, just don’t have the head for it.
But, in regards to the reasoning for not moving inland much distance during the boat migration, I had seen a program that said that was due, probably, to the mega-fauna such as what they called the “God Bear”, the saber tooth cat, and the dire wolf. Is there anything to that? Or was it the usual over simplified “for tv” stuff that often gets put out?
Probably more that they were very used to making their living on the coast and moving inland would have required a lot of new adaptations. When all of your tools are adapted to fishing, shellfish gathering, and sea mammal hunting certainly the larger inland animals would have been a challenge. Deer would have been easy, and the small critters even easier.
Also, is there any real solid evidence to a land bridge migration? I would assume that the mammoth and such type critters being distributed on both sides of the water would indicate such a thing, but has anything been discovered that pegs it as a certainty?
There is plenty of good evidence for the land migration, both for humans and for earlier critters. With the latest DNA studies, they are now working on the exact order of the migrations (both of humans and animals), and the routes each population took.
And, for general comm purposes:
Sciencer = Bureaucrat. Science is a job that requires no boat rocking and never indulges in consensus bucking.
Sciencian = Fundamental worshiper of the image of science. No questions asked. Devotion to whomever dominates in the academic cult of personality.
Scientist = the people that make it work and all too often get passed over in credit and reward for Sciencers and Sciencians.
Fair enough! (But you left out underpaid.)
Other than that, I was just being my usual snarky self. I like science, just don’t have the head for it.
I won't laugh at any serious question. Snarky is fine, but I reserve the right to bite back!
In addition to islands, you would have had river mouths with sandbars as potential stopping-off places. The farther south, the more favorable these would have been even during the ice age.
Re “yammering.”
It seems that European trained anthropologists and paleontologists have tended to ignore the possibilities of underwater research for the Ice Age periods. I don’t know whether this is tunnel vision or lack of grant money to explore under water which can be quite expensive. Graham Hancock has done a lot to spark interest in searching underwater with his books and he has a Graham Hancock Forum. I think that treasure hunter Ballard has gone in with some academic types on a project to explore off shore of Texas in the Caribbean.
I saw that too. One thing I found interesting was the 2 or 3 foot layers of sediment left over from the Younger-Dryas period, covering the Clovis evidence.
This makes me wonder how deep/far should scientist dig to uncover evidence of past civilizations. Seems most are satisfied with shallow digs that only go back a few tens of thousands of years or looking for specimens uncovered in more ancient rock by erosion.
It's possible, with all the catastrophic events through history, evidence of man past may be lost forever. Aside from the fragments found now and then, we may never know how advanced man became between mass extinction events.
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