Posted on 11/19/2004 8:07:26 AM PST by blam
Fire Pit Dated to Be Over 50,000 Years Old
Thu Nov 18,10:10 AM ET Top Stories - AP
By AMY GEIER EDGAR, Associated Press Writer
COLUMBIA, S.C. - In the growing debate about when people first appeared on this continent, a leading archaeologist said Wednesday he has discovered what could be sooty evidence of human occupation in North America tens of thousands of years earlier than is commonly believed.
University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River.
Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation.
"It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned."
Since the 1960s, anthropologists have generally accepted that hunters migrated to North America about 13,000 years ago over a land bridge into Alaska following the retreat of Ice Age glaciers.
But other sites, including the Topper dig in South Carolina, have yielded rough stone tools and other artifacts suggesting that humans lived in North America thousands of years earlier when the climate was much colder. While there is no ironclad proof that an older culture existed, scientists are increasingly open to the idea that humans arrived from many other directions besides the northwest, perhaps even sailing across oceans.
But a 50,000-year-old fire pit would scorch the prevailing occupation theory.
Goodyear's evidence was examined by other scientists, who performed radiocarbon tests on samples to determine their age. However, he made his initial case for the fire pit Wednesday in a news conference rather publishing data in a scientific journal edited by other researchers.
Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.
Thomas Stafford, director of Stafford Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., then took samples of the substance for tests at the University of California at Irvine.
The results showed that wood varieties — oak, pine, red cherry and buckeye — had been burned in a low-temperature fire at least 50,300 years ago, he said.
Stafford described the burnt layer as measuring 2 or 3 inches thick and about 2 feet wide. Rather than a simple black band in the soil, Stafford said the layer had the "shape of a very shallow plate."
He said it could have been the result of a fire tended by humans, or the ashes could have been deposited by wind, rain or flooding.
Other researchers were more skeptical of Goodyear's discovery, noting that previous claims of very old occupation at other sites never have been verified.
"We still need to be cautious," said Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay. "I would not yet rewrite the books. The find is very significant and shows that there is much we don't understand and can't easily reject or accept."
Other scientists were blunter.
"I think it's a 50,000-year-old geologic deposit," said University of Texas archaeologist Mike Collins. "It has almost nothing to do with the story of the peopling of North America."
Modern humans are believed to have emerged from Africa 100,000 years ago and spread around the world, elbowing out less capable human cousins like Homo erectus and Neanderthals.
Thanks. The vastness of FR still impresses me.
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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ALLENDALE, S.C. (AP) - Some chipped tools and stone flakes found on a hill above a remote and wooded stretch of the Savannah River may show humans arrived in America about 3,000 years earlier than first thought.
Researchers have generally accepted that the first humans came to America as primitive hunters from Asia 12,000 years ago. But the South Carolina finds are the latest evidence that the continent was inhabited 15,000 years ago, well before the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago, archaeologists say.
"It is now reasonable to think of humans living on this landscape perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 years ago," said University of South Carolina archaeologist Albert Goodyear, who is helping to excavate the site. "It's the dawn of a new chapter in what was already a good book."
Coupled with mounting evidence of early human activity from scattered locations including a gravel pit in Virginia, a cave in Pennsylvania and a bog in Chile, the stone tools excavated in South Carolina suggest that human populations were spread across both continents 15,000 years ago.
Last year, a University of Oklahoma archaeologist suggested some broken stone tools found in the northwestern part of the state could be at least 22,000 years old.
The sites are so far apart that the earliest visitors could only have arrived earlier than once thought, or reached the Americas by more than one route, some researches theorize.
Goodyear and his team of archaeologists first uncovered the tools three years ago along a section of the river in Allendale County owned by Clariant, a Swiss-based chemical company.
Microscopic analysis of the stone chips confirmed that they could only have been created by human activity. The area may have served as a sort of workshop, where prehistoric people made the implements they needed for working wood and scraping animal hides.
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