The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Posted on 07/25/2003 6:40:03 PM PDT by Lessismore
As elusive as the Cheshire Cat, the first people to arrive in the Americas have tended to appear and vanish with each new twist in the archaeological record. The latest disappearing act may be taking place on page 501, where new evidence, some claim, casts another shadow over a once-cherished idea: that Asian big-game hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge to give rise to the Clovis people, who were considered the first Americans. New dates show that a crucial Siberian site, thought to be a way station along the Bering road, wasn't occupied until after the Clovis had begun killing mammoths in North America.
The new finding "removes what was, until now, the critical link in the chain connecting Clovis to Siberia," says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The paper "is really thought-provoking," adds Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C. "Maybe it's time to consider less obvious sources for the oldest migration to the continent," he says.
Who the earliest Americans were and how they got there is one of anthropology's biggest riddles. The first universally acknowledged culture in the Americas is that of the Clovis, who scattered their distinctively fluted projectile tips across North America starting about 13,600 years ago (using corrected radiocarbon dates) before vanishing several centuries later. Their ancestors were thought to have crossed the land bridge that sometimes linked present-day Alaska and northeastern Siberia; the bridge appeared and disappeared with the fall and rise of sea level during the last Ice Age (see map). But a handful of pre-Clovis sites, including one in Monte Verde, Chile, dated to about 15,000 years ago, have challenged this idea (Science, 2 March 2001, p. 1730).
For researchers who believe that the Clovis were truly the first Americans, the site of Ushki Lake on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula has been a critical piece of evidence. One of the few late Ice Age sites in northeastern Asia, it was discovered in 1964 by Siberian archaeologist Nikolai Dikov, who ran a secretive dig for 25 years. "He rarely invited anyone out to the site apart from trusted colleagues and students," says paleoanthropologist Ted Goebel of the University of Nevada, Reno. But word began to filter out, and in 1978 Dikov, in his first English publication on Ushki, offered some brief but tantalizing descriptions about what he'd found. One layer at the site, dated to 12,600 years ago, included wedge-shaped cores, tiny stone blades, and burins: pointed tools for carving bone and antler. And beneath the floor of an earthen shelter, next to human bones, Dikov also discovered a very different collection of implements, including flaked cores and chipped bifacial points, and stone beads that he called wampum. Most striking was the date: Charcoal in the grave was dated to 16,800 years ago. If Dikov was right, Ushki's earliest inhabitants--even though their stone points are shaped differently from those of the Clovis--might have provided one ancestral Clovis strand.
Wondering if the site had more secrets to reveal, Goebel contacted Dikov's widow, archaeologist Margarita Dikova of the Northeast Asian Interdisciplinary Research Science Center in Magadan, Russia, who agreed to a joint expedition in 2000. Joined by Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station, they spent 3 weeks sampling and mapping the sediments at Ushki Lake. Goebel came away with a new appreciation of Dikov's work. "Everything he did was impeccable," he says. Everything except one: New analyses of charcoal fragments showed that the grave is only about 13,000 years old--6 centuries later than the first Clovis points. "I was pretty shocked," says Goebel.
Thus the Ushki Lake inhabitants themselves cannot be ancestral to the Clovis people. But to Goebel and his team, Ushki's dating facelift doesn't rule out Clovis origins in Beringia. Goebel notes that the most ancient known Beringians are now those of the Nenana culture, who fashioned small biface points and knives; their oldest site, Broken Mammoth in central Alaska, is dated to 14,000 years ago, although no one is certain when or from where they reached Alaska.
It's possible, says Goebel, that these Beringians raced down into the North American plains in a few centuries, developing into Clovis as they went--a sprint many consider worthy of the Iditarod. "I do not see this as a dilemma," says eminent geochronologist C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He notes that recent dating suggests that the Clovis culture may be a few centuries younger, making the run from Alaska somewhat more plausible. According to Haynes, mammoths and other large animals encountered along the way would have required new hunting strategies and weapon designs that may have spurred the development of the Clovis point.
The other possibility, the authors say, is that there is no link between Clovis and the cultures of Ushki and Nenana, opening up a wide variety of scenarios for the peopling of the Americas. Some Bering enthusiasts favor a much earlier migration across the land bridge--before the last glacial maximum 24,000 years ago--leaving ample time to reach Monte Verde. "I think with time we will find a link between Siberia and America, but it will be a much older link," Waters says. The newly discovered Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in northern Siberia, claimed to be 25,000 or more years old, may support that idea. Others disagree. "There's no evidence as yet in either Siberia or the Americas to support this," says NMNH anthropologist Dennis Stanford.
With NMNH colleague Bruce Bradley, Stanford is a leading proponent of multiple entry points for early Americans, including the once-heretical idea of an ancient North Atlantic crossing. Stanford notes that points and blades from a controversial site at Cactus Hill, Virginia, "show remarkable correspondence to Clovis" and may be as much as 18,000 years old. The artifacts also closely resemble the Solutrean technology of northern Spain from around that time. "If artifacts resembling Solutrean were found in western Beringia, most archaeologists would propose an ancestral relationship with Clovis," says Stanford, who argues that "we must look outside of northeast Asia" for the origins of the earliest Americans. Meltzer disagrees. Ushki's fall, he argues, "does not mean we should give up on Siberia and go looking for Clovis origins in all the wrong places"--which to him means Europe.
One thing the experts do agree on is that the archaeological record is too sparse to settle the debate. "This isn't a problem we can think our way out of," says Meltzer, who urges a redoubling of efforts in Siberia. "We need more early sites and data." The link between Clovis and Ushki Lake may be fading, but for many, the Siberian connection hasn't lost its Cheshire grin.
The first Americans were those who left Europe seeking a new life in a new world. Others lived there before, but they weren't Americans.
13,000 years ago, therefore, seems really LATE for the dawn of AmerIndian civilization.
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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution.The Solutrean Hypothesis in North American archaeologyTo all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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Ahead of your time. Now, they're theorizing that the first Modern Humans may have left Africa on boats.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks Lessismore.
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