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."
Ballard is primarily known for underwater research. There is a topic (or two) about his participation with Gulf of Mexico research, and of course, he found those Phoenician ships off Israel five or more years ago, and a Byzantine ship in the Black Sea, among other things.
“We may never know how advanced man became between mass extinction events.”
My thought for a long time exactly. Also, what was the trigger for the change from 40 ky ice events to 100 ky ice events starting about a million years ago. Could there be a cometary long orbit cycle responsible? And have scientists or interested amateurs examined maps to detect other subtle comet type craters?
Some seem to indicate a comet that would appear in close proximity to the Earth for six years then, eventually breaking up and impacting the planet. This disaster would preclude the coming of the AntiChrist’s reign.
Are you aware of any such comet that makes regular visits to our part of the universe?(not trying to get all Biblical on ya)
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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This topic was posted , thanks again blam.
Selections from the Bison keyword, sorted:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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