Posted on 02/15/2005 4:44:02 PM PST by Mr. Mojo
GOODLAND, Kan. - Scientists say mammoth and camel bones unearthed in northwest Kansas that date back 12,200 years could be part of "one of the most important archaeological sites in North America."
The bones, found last June in Sherman County near the Colorado border, were alongside a piece of stone that archaeologists say was the kind used in tools that humans once used to butcher animals.
Archaeological geologist Rolfe Mandel of the Kansas Geological Survey said carbon-14 dating completed last week shows the bones are between 12,200 and 12,300 years old, which could mean humans lived on the Great Plains 1,300 years earlier than previously thought.
Mandel said if excavations this summer verify the finding of the stone tool, it would make the archaeological site among the oldest in the New World.
"It would be one of the most important sites in North America," he said.
Researchers initially found mammoth bone and stone-tool flint next to each other in soil dating back 11,000 years at the site. Below that, they found mammoth and camel bone that were fractured in a way that they say could only have been caused by people who shattered bone with stone to either make flaked bone tools or get to the marrow.
"Some scientists won't be convinced that the older bones got here because of human hunters," said Mandel, who is leading the team that found the bones. "I'm not convinced, either. But I'm 75 percent convinced. There are few other ways the bones could be broken naturally the way they're broken."
Ancient and more modern stone-age hunters sharpened their butchering tools alongside the bodies of the animals they killed, flaking flint off dulled stone-knife blades and leaving traces of their sharpening work beside the bones.
Mandel said he's absolutely positive about the layer of 11,000-year-old bones and stone artifacts, which he said make the Sherman County dig the oldest site of verified human occupation and activity in Kansas, and among the oldest in North America.
The dig began after a landowner in the area found a mammoth tooth in 1976 and contacted the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. In the 1980s, a paleontologist who found animal bones there noted that the fracture patters on the bones were unusual.
Based on mammoth-kill sites in western North America, scientists previously dated the earliest confirmed evidence of humans on the Great Plains at 11,000 to 11,500 years ago. Mandel said the new evidence will add to the debate over when humans inhabited the Western Hemisphere.
Conventional wisdom has been that people came across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago. But Mandel said the northwest Kansas dig means "we're rethinking not only when people arrived, but where they came from."
Mandel said material at the site indicates a small family of nomads likely used it as a campsite. Those people would have drifted across the land, following herds of animals, he said.
"It would have been a very rough lifestyle," Mandel said.
seriously?
Boats were needed ~ Columbus proved that ~ and there was still the problem of all that ice floating around.
Alternatively we can get Europeans to America via Berengia quite easily, whether 35,000 years ago or 12,000 years ago. Their genotype was far more widespread in Eurasia thousands of years ago than it is today.
Unfortunately during several lengthy droughts wind blown loess has covered them up.
I have always thought that the Algonkian language family had a strange likeness to the Slavic (in this case it would have been proto-proto slavic)
That's what I thought. This find merely moves that back a few hundred years.
The nomadic & tool-toting Homo Sapien is believed to have emerged in Africa...millions of years ago...wandered north...split at the Europe/Asia-bound fork...continued nomading & tool-toting there until the Ice Age presented the opportunity for the Asian dudes to cross the 'ice bridge' on foot & hunker down in Alaskan igloos...continuing to nomad & tool-tote South to the Americas in what now appears to be ABOUT 13,000 to 12,500 years ago. Later, around 500 years ago, these original, 'native' inhabitants were confronted by the same Euro-trash they had split with long, long ago, when the latter arrived on a clever tool they had developed called the 'boat'. There you have it.
This tendency to wander continues even to this day...always going SOMEWHERE, then returning...driving to distraction anyone who happens to be "...stuck in Folsom Prison...".
One of the most interesting (to me) sites is located in northeast Nebraska, near Oneill at the Ashfalls Fossil Beds. It has some of the best preserved prehistoric fossils of rhino, horse, and camel examples which occurred when volcanic ash covered the area about 10 million years ago. later, ldf
It was Teddy "the swimmer" Kennedy driven around with that pack of chevy nomads!
Slavic?
Can you elaborate?
This is a area which has been of interest to me for a long time.
I thought I had spotted a realtionship with Japanese mythology, but don't know enough Russian to do any evaluation on my own.
... and I on the opposite shore will be,
ready ro ride and spread trhe alarm,
to every middlesex village and farm.
Right, 8th grade! I remember that! Sort of.
Actually, the major debate on the west coast is of an early coastal migration, independent from and probably earlier than the inland migration. This idea explains a lot, including the early Santa Rosa Island skeleton (13,400 years old), and possibly Kennewick and other early skeletal remains from that area.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Well could this then tell us that those days of creation are explained by Peter ?????
II Peter 3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing,
that one day is with the LORD as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
No they're mine!
I can't give you cites for this anymore but I read several years ago that Ojibwe, an Algonkian language, has 600 or more words that are cognates with Old Norse and mean the same thing.
This was first discovered by Henry Schoolcraft, a 19th Century Educator who married an Ojibwe/Chippewa Chief's daughter.
Place names, whose origin has been forgotten, describe in O. N. what one can still see portayed in geographic features.
Just an interesting tidbit that may remain an enigma.
There are some bad blizzards in the winter.
"The fact that the Atlantic was 300 miles narrower, and the seas 300' lower, seems to escape academia."
Must have, because this is the first time I've heard that.
Fascinating.
Maybe that explains Kennewick man, eh?
Hey, Russell Means, get your johnny-come-lately squatter butt off my land!
Folks who populated Australia 50,000 years ago had to have a boat. Why couldn't Kennewick man's ancestors have also arrived on boats 35,000 years later?
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