Bye, Bye Beringia (8,000 Year Old Site In Florida)

Explore North ^ | 8-12-2003 | Bill Jones

[blam]

Bye Bye, Beringia

Anthropology and Archaeology of The Americas
by Bill Jones

One might think that Archeology sites throughout the World have produced many datable human remains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ancient human remains have so rarely been found that these singular findings could not be connected to others to form chronologies about human evolution.

The scarcity of human remains to be analyzed has prevented the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology from forming conclusions about the cultural levels of ancient humans. We try to measure the culture of a people in terms of the totality of their socially developed behavior, their arts, crafts, tools, and language. As a result of scarcity of samplings, ancient humans have been generally classified in such terms as; savages, hunter-gatherers, roving bands, etc. This is especially so for the early inhabitants of the New World. Some recent discoveries shatter that prevailing picture of the ancient people of North America.

The Windover Site at Titusville, Florida 4,500 miles to the South and East of Beringia is the Windover Archaeology site. One of the so-called roving bands of hunters settled there to live. At Windover, more ancient human remains were discovered than the total of all others found previously in the New World, and they were the oldest. The Windover site produced the largest and oldest group of human remains, and most complete insight of an ancient culture ever found. The following quoted article tells of some astounding findings there. The following article was originally published on May 16, 1996 by The News Herald (Panama City, Florida), and is reprinted here with permission:

Archaeology finds new picture of Paleo Indians
By: Robert Suriano, Florida Today

Melbourne -- Food was plentiful in the lush land that was Broward County 8,000 years ago, making life good for the people who buried their dead in a shallow pond near Titusville. They walked the ground between the site of today's Walt Disney World and the Space Coast, hunting white-tailed deer and bobcat among the pine and oak trees. They fished for bass and sunfish or scooped up turtles, frogs, and snakes. Their primary job -- filling their stomachs -- took only about two hours each day, leaving plenty of time for making jewelry from bones and seeds or weaving clothing from the leaves of sabal palm.

That is a richly detailed picture that continues to emerge today of the Paleo-Indians, whose watery burial ground was discovered in 1982 during construction of a housing project off State road 405. Known worldwide as the Windover Archaeological Site, more than a decade of research from that dig is challenging previous notions about these people of the distant past.

"They enjoyed a good lifestyle, said Glen Doran, the Florida State University archaeologist who oversaw the Windover excavation that lasted from 1984 to 1986. "Life was a little easier than it even may have been a few thousand years later. You had a a lot of different resources packed pretty densely into this area within a few kilometers walk in any direction. Clearly, this was a good place to be."
And so it remains for Fran and William Hinson and child, 12 year old Hilary, who play in the yard that borders the burial site, now a National Historic Landmark.

"I was intrigued with their level of civilization," she said. "They exhibited a civilization far beyond what had been previously believed that ancient Indians in North America and Florida would have shown." The Windover site, named for the sprawling rural housing development that surrounds it, bore archaeological treasures that amazed experts with their quality and quantity.

*Skeletal remains of 169 people, split almost evenly between males and females, ranging from 6 to 70 years old. About 75 of the skeletons were relatively intact.

*90 intact human brains that include the oldest DNA samples in the World.
*Artifacts of wood, bone, and seed that were made into jewelry and tools, providing insight into the ancient peoples' lives.
*Tests showed the oldest skeletons were buried 8,100 years ago. The youngest was placed in the ground 6,900 years ago.
"To put this into context," Doran said, "these people had already been dead for 3,000 or 4,000 years before the first stones were laid for the Egyptian pyramids!"
They were lean and robust, most likely a copper-skinned people. The tallest man stood 5 feet and 6 inches tall. The average woman was 5 feet and 2 inches.
Like all people of their time, about 6,000 BC, they kept moving in a yearly pattern that followed the most ample sources of food. For this group that meant walking the land between the St Johns River and the Ocean.
They had risen above the subsistence level, giving them time to do things not typically associated with early people.
But they were not free from human hostility. The remains of a 29 year old male show a deep wound in the buttocks, probably caused by an antler. The injury is such that Doran thinks it was caused by a human wielding the antler in anger. He says that the wound is counter to previously stated views of these people as passive. Most of the other skeletal remains showed signs of long festering infections that likely brought natural deaths during a time before antibiotics and medicine. But overall, the group appeared to be healthy. They had triumphed over the rigors of daily life.

"Relative to a lot of other populations at this time period, these folks were relatively well off." Doran said. A sign of their wealth is the cloth that was found among the bodies, the oldest cloth ever found in the Western hemisphere.

"This cloth will set the example," Doran said. It is rare that fabric textiles even 1,000 years old are preserved in the United States."
*All told, 87 cloth fragments from an estimated 67 complete items were recovered from the dig. The cloth was made from the leaves of sabal palm. The pieces reveal five different methods of fabric making, all without benefit of a loom. Even so, some fabrics are woven as tightly as a cotton T-shirt. Others are made more loosely twined into blankets, capes, and toga-like garments.

*Some skeletons were found with especially fine cloth, suggesting some of the dead enjoyed a special status, but not necessarily a society of kings and paupers. In addition to the cloth, artifacts of bone and wood were found among some of the skeletons. They include a wooden pestle and a paddle, perhaps used to pound plant fibers for weaving; a small hammer, needles made from deer antler, and the bones of manatees, rabbits, and fish.

If the number and quality of skeletal remains at the site caught the attention of archaeologists, an added discovery in 1984 caused great excitement.

*They found one skull that contained a soft, greasy, lard like substance. Doran scooped the material out and stored it in the refrigerator of his Cocoa apartment before sending it to a laboratory for chemical analysis. He guessed that it could be anything from slime mold to brain tissue.
"Organic matter," was the laboratory analysis. The material had decayed too much for the tests to determine whether it was human brain tissue.

A second chance came in December. Archaeologists found another skull with the substance inside. This time they sent the entire skull to the University of Florida laboratory in Gainesville, where molecular biologist, William Hauswirth and his colleagues were waiting. Instead of spooning out the material. Hauswirth removed the rear portion of the skull and tilted it. A shrunken but intact human brain slid out! Over time, the organ had lost mass and its tissue had mixed with peat, but the softball-sized matter was clearly a brain.
*By the end of the excavation, 91 brains were recovered. Ninety of them, minus the first that was not salvaged, are stored in the pathology freezer at Sands Hospital in Gainesville.
Although brain tissue has been discovered before, this was the first time that intact human brains had been preserved. Even while the bodies' other soft tissues deteriorated, the brains were secure in the safest place in the body, the skull.
"The crania is well designed to protect your brain while you are living," Doran said. "The end result is that it protects it when your are dead too."
The brains hold a frozen gold mine of genetic information in the form of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. While Doran said he thinks older human DNA has been recovered elsewhere in the World, so much of the genetic material never has been isolated from a single group of people.

Hauswirth said it contains genetic markers, or specific segments of DNA that are affiliated with one small subset of modern American Indians. This suggests that the Windover people did not reproduce with people from other groups, a finding that again challenges previous assumptions.

A New Culture Model for the Ancients

The primary significance of Windover is the seeming sophisticated culture of these people who lived there 8,100 years ago and before. Windover dates an advanced culture in North America that precedes any previously discovered anywhere else in the World. Their egalitarian culture paints a new picture of ancient people of the Americas. Until now, the model of ancient peoples pictured roving bands of hunters, grunting semi-savages, having no culture to speak of. Of course, the 4,700 BP pyramid builders of Egypt had advanced further in terms of architectural achievements and they had pictograph symbols to convey meaning, but they came along 3,400 years after the Windover people. Windover revealed a culture of people in the New World, twice as old as the Egyptian culture. Of course, there are artful paintings of animals and symbols in caves that are attributed to the Neanderthals, but little else to associate with Culture.

Now we know that 8,000 years ago, the Windover people wove fine cloth.; They buried their dead ceremonially. They cared for each other; by indulging and taking care of the handicapped. And they adorned the bodies of their dead with fine clothing, placing them in special positions that were spiritual to them, and things that would be useful in an after life were buried with them.

Logic places them in Florida for quite some time before they buried their dead in that peat bog. How long?; 1000 years? 5000? Could the ancestors of the Windover people have been the Clovis of New Mexico 11,000 years ago? Time, distance, and logic says not. The Windover people might be the ancestors of the Seminoles. They might be related to other Paleo Indian cultures of North America, past and present. There is sufficient human DNA to find out. The ancient human DNA is of such quality as to allow genetic cloning, or to make comparisons with present living ethnic groups, or to test kinship with other ancient peoples. But the latter would require usable DNA, and this treasure trove seems to be the oldest group of human DNA ever found anywhere in the World. Also, the artifacts collection has an abundance of the oldest fabrics ever found in the Western hemisphere... 8,000 year old cloth woven as fine as in a cotton t-shirt! At first it was thought that the clothing was hand woven, but that does seem to be possible. They must have used some sort of apparatus, a loom, to weave such fine cloth.

[GOPJ]

bump

[blam]

If you like this sort of stuff, I highly recommend this book: Eden In The East

Click on the link and scroll down to the editoral review. Very unique and interesting book.

[blam]

"I saw the headline and thought that it was talking about a Buddha, a man, preserved for 1,300 years. Now that would have impressed me!"

Thought you may like these 8,000 year old folks in this article.

[Rebelbase]

"The ancient human DNA is of such quality as to allow genetic cloning, "

[muawiyah]

The X-Factor genes are found in modern North American Indians ~ as well as in North African Berbers and Fenno-Scandian Sa'ami.

There's a discovery in Oregon (other than Kennewick Man) that's something like 13,000 years old ~ and some quite entertaining Korean-style heated home-sites in Alaska that predate such devices in Korea.

I don't think anyone is quite sure of who was first, but the process has clearly been additive ~ and is still going on.

[muawiyah]

Blam, remember, if you have teeth from the upper-jaw your finding of Jomon is set. Without those teeth everything is less than definitive.

[muawiyah]

Wiigwaasabak - just had an interesting little read trying to find out if any new work had been done on North American Indian writing/record-keeping systems.

[blam]

"The X-Factor genes are found in modern North American Indians ~ as well as in North African Berbers and Fenno-Scandian Sa'ami.
"There's a discovery in Oregon (other than Kennewick Man) that's something like 13,000 years old ~ and some quite entertaining Korean-style heated home-sites in Alaska that predate such devices in Korea."

"I don't think anyone is quite sure of who was first, but the process has clearly been additive ~ and is still going on."

There's some recent DNA data from the Oregon sample, I believe...quite interesting. SunkenCiv may be able to provide links to the articles.

The religious folks finally got CoyoteMan (PhD Archaeology) to say something that got him banned...He's no longer on FR. He can be found at Darwin Central as Coyote.

[muawiyah]

Gee Whiz, must have missed that ~ just posted to CoyoteMan a couple of days ago.

Maybe the Admins relented.

[blam]

"The X-Factor genes are found in modern North American Indians ~ as well as in North African Berbers and Fenno-Scandian Sa'ami."

Notice that professor Oppenheimer's studies (Journey Of Mankind) places humans at Meadowcroft 25,000 years ago where they become isolated during the LGM. I suspect these are the haplogroup X folks.

[PapaBear3625]

There's some recent DNA data from the Oregon sample, I believe...quite interesting. SunkenCiv may be able to provide links to the articles.

I'd be interested in what info there is on this. I'm fascinated at the idea that early proto-Europeans were the real first Americans.

[blam]

"I'd be interested in what info there is on this. I'm fascinated at the idea that early proto-Europeans were the real first Americans. "

I'm not sure who these folks are but they aren't the people we were taught about when I was in school.

Vintage Skulls

"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas.

"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans.

[muawiyah]

Note to self ~ that thread where Coyoteman is sending a message to JR was one I thought deserving of no more than a couple of dozen posts. It looks like it got up to 1200 posts.

Must have been a cold and snowy day.

Frankly, ever since they worked out ways of developing the genome, and then discovered gazillions of free genes just floating around at sea in viruses, I've become convinced we are just at the very bottom of a vast body of research into genetics that's going to lead to conclusions 20 years from now we cannot even now begin to imagine.

Now, back to this thread ~ first folks here ~ and I think Blam's got it right ~ the Sa'ami (Sa'ami predecessors actually) should have been able to get to North America over the ice as far back as 35,000 years ago ~ that's when the folks were painting pictures of walruses in caves in France (which was then a very long way from the sea).

However, we know those painters still had an African body type ~ you can tell that by figuring out how tall and lithe the guys were who put their handprints on the ceilings.

It may be been entirely too rigorous for such folks to cross the North Atlantic ~ too many body type changes to get done. Even 25,000 years back may have been too soon.

BTW, point I'd like to make is that Charles Darwin comes into this picture. He had what seems to be an arrhythmic heart beat typical of the type you can get with any one of three genes that cause porphyria almost exclusively in Sa'ami (and related Scandinavians).

He also seemed to have a lifelong pattern of "suffering" from bouts of diarrhea more typical of being infected by a parasite than anything ~ but certainly typical of having one of the 12 known genes for Celiac disease (all typically found in higher percentages in Sa'ami than any other group, with one such gene actually traceable to Sa'ami).

When Charles lived in town he'd suffer and when he went to the country he'd get relief. I think the difference is due simply to his consumption of bread in town (bakeries were commonly found there) and potatoes and vegetables in the country.

Celiac is an intolerance of wheat gluten BTW, and bread's a killer.

Then there's the mysterious Unidentifiable Infertility of several of his offspring.

One theory is that such infertility in offspring is due to the presence of a certain X chromosome in the mother, and a certain Y chromosome in the father. The Y provides a certain "extra vigor" to the sperm making them more motile and thereby more fertile.

As long as you aren't having babies by a first cousin (who has that X chromosome that kind of helps produce that extra motility) your kids will be OK. However, if you have babies by a first cousin with that particular X chromosome, you will have a 50/50 chance of having infertile offspring.

Gee whiz, that's what Charles Darwin's kids were like.

These Sa'ami "get away with living in the cold" special genes also have a high incidence of occurrence in the Orkneys.

Those folks, in turn, are tied into every royal and noble family in Europe. Charles Darwin's wife's mother's family appear to be part of that line ~ since all inquiries into her family genealogy take you directly to "the family" ~ all the way back to King Frosti.

I suspect Charles' voyage to the Galapagos provided him considerable relief since they subsisted on foods other than grains.

Otherwise, he was sick all the time in lower latitude society. Made him unsocial ~ virtually a recluse ~ and his heart palpitations and arrhythmia's would send him to bed for months. Then there were the times when the porphyria would get to him ~ and thank the Lord I don't have that problem (beyond a little excess iron excretion on a seasonal basis).

Now, getting back to the point at hand ~ Charles Darwin is a good example of a highly evolved human being ~ he was COLD ADAPTED. Unfortunately he lived in a time and age where he would not have known that ~ he and others who knew of his problems would simply believe that he was sick with some sort of parasite he may have acquired in South America wading around in the Amazon.

Others of his tribe, the early Clovis people, were undoubtedly similarly evolved, but they wouldn't have known that either. Unfortunately for them, they were so Cold Adapted they could live at the foot of the glaciers, so when the comet or meteor hit the residual ice cap in Canada some 9500 years ago (creating the Younger Dryas), they were all huddled together in the wrong place and were wiped out.

[muawiyah]

There's considerable debate over skull shapes having any significance ~ seems that they change back and forth randomly over a long enough period of time.

I've looked for some specific studies on the net without success, but this factoid shows up regularly.

It is believable.

At the same time, the Clovis people could very well have had African skulls, so maybe these guys were Clovis.

Be good to find bones associated with the artifacts.

[blam]

I thought the comet strike was 12,900 years ago?

Anyway, you'll like this: Neanderthal Genome To Be Unveiled

[muawiyah]

Younger Dyras = 12800 years before present. So, 10,800 BC.

Lasted just under 1400 years, or until 9400 BC.

I think I flipped the end number to the beginning of the thought process.

Next big item on the agenda is BLACK LAKE FLOODS (7600 years before present), and then SAHARA DESERT PLUVIAL ENDS (5500 years before present).

There, all the big news since the end of the last Great Glaciation in one concise paragraph.

If it's not one thing it's another.

I'm still shooting for some confirmation of a vast soliton at the end of the first stage of the Antarctic meltdown ~ this would wipe everything anywhere within 500 miles of the ocean "clean".

[SunkenCiv]

I’d be shakin’ my finger at all of you for pulling me back into such an old topic — if I weren’t the usual culprit for doing just that. ;’)

Prehistoric Oregon latrine trove of fossil DNA
AP | 21 Sep 2008 | Jeff Barnard
Posted on 09/22/2008 2:06:38 PM PDT by BGHater
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2087951/posts

How Did People Reach the Americas?
US News | July 24, 2008 | Andrew Curry
Posted on 07/27/2008 10:12:03 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2052126/posts

Oregon Discovery Challenges Beliefs About First Humans
PBS | 7-1-2008 | Lee Hochberg
Posted on 07/01/2008 8:20:04 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2039558/posts

[SunkenCiv]

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[PapaBear3625]

Thank you, SunkenCiv!

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure!