From University of Chicago Press Journals: New research challenges the controversial theory that an ancient comet impact devastated the Clovis people, one of the earliest known cultures to inhabit North America.
Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologists Vance Holliday (University of Arizona) and David Meltzer (Southern Methodist University) argue that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations. “Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record,” the researchers write. “Insofar as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
The comet theory first emerged in 2007 when a team of scientists announced evidence of a large extraterrestrial impact that occurred about 12,900 years ago. The impact was said to have caused a sudden cooling of the North American climate, killing off mammoths and other megafauna. It could also explain the apparent disappearance of the Clovis people, whose characteristic spear points vanish from the archaeological record shortly after the supposed impact.
As evidence for the rapid Clovis depopulation, comet theorists point out that very few Clovis archaeological sites show evidence of human occupation after the Clovis. At the few sites that do, Clovis and post-Clovis artifacts are separated by archaeologically sterile layers of sediments, indicating a time gap between the civilizations. In fact, comet theorists argue, there seems to be a dead zone in the human archaeological record in North America beginning with the comet impact and lasting about 500 years.
Caption: This image shows the excavations at the Lubbock Lake site, on the High Plains of Texas. The crew is working in the laminated lake beds dated 13,000 to 12,000 years old. The time of the purported extraterrestrial impact would be at the base of the lake beds. The pale olive yellow layer below contains Clovis-age bone. The black layers represent a marshy valley bottom and contain archaeological bone beds (with butchered remains of extinct bison). The white layers are archaeologically “sterile” because they represent standing lake water (probably 1 to 2 m deep). Thus, the presence of “sterile” zones between occupation layers has no bearing on the issue of an impact and people.
Credit: Vance Holliday
But Holliday and Meltzer dispute those claims. They argue that a lack of later human occupation at Clovis sites is no reason to assume a population collapse. “Single-occupation Paleoindian sites—Clovis or post-Clovis—are the norm,” Holliday said. That’s because many Paleoindian sites are hunting kill sites, and it would be highly unlikely for kills to be made repeatedly in the exact same spot.
“So there is nothing surprising about a Clovis occupation with no other Paleoindian zone above it, and it is no reason to infer a disaster,” Holliday said.
In addition, Holliday and Meltzer compiled radiocarbon dates of 44 archaeological sites from across the U.S. and found no evidence of a post-comet gap. “Chronological gaps appear in the sequence only if one ignores standard deviations (a statistically inappropriate procedure), and doing so creates gaps not just around [12,900 years ago] but also at many later points in time,” they write.
Sterile layers separating occupation zones at some sites are easily explained by shifting settlement patterns and local geological processes, the researchers say. The separation should not be taken as evidence of an actual time gap between Clovis and post-Clovis cultures.
Holliday and Meltzer believe that the disappearance of Clovis spear points is more likely the result of a cultural choice rather than a population collapse. “There is no compelling data to indicate that North American Paleoindians had to cope with or were affected by a catastrophe, extraterrestrial or otherwise, in the terminal Pleistocene,” they conclude.
Caption: These are Clovis Points.
Credit: David Meltzer
Vance T. Holliday and David J. Meltzer, “The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians.” Current Anthropology 51:5 (October 2010).
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. The journal is published by The University of Chicago Press and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
I believe the Clovis culture died out because they ran out of mammoths which caused a dramatic rise in temperature and a massive reforestation, which, in turn, caused them to get permanently lost in the woods.
So, that is what they believe. There are two sides to this issue. That is their side of it. 90% of archeology is extrapolation, anyway. They find two shards of pottery or one bone and tell us all about an entire society from that. As an applied scientist (mechanical engineer) I don’t even consider archeology as a science. It is history that leans on science. They don’t do their own C14 dating. They don’t do their own chemical analyses. And when C14 dates come back “out of range,” they reject them without examination as having been “obviously” contaminated. So, basically, they fudge their data. Where have we here hard that one before?
I don’t think its fair to tell archaeologists that their science is worthless, yes it is a lot of guess-work same as a lot of other sciences that attempt to write history on such fragmented knowledge. I think the better bet is to look at their works individually and pass judgement on the works themselves along with the theories (like in this particular post..)
Some of the works will be by fools obviously, but I don’t think just calling all archaeologists climate scientists is fair by just a couple examples…Yes, its not a traditional science that uses a lot of extrapolation and assumptions, but this is what history is in a nut-shell.
History is important, because its from this that we can look at climate change from a big picture. Starting in around 1900, major scientists have flip-flopped from global cooling to global warming every 30 years like clock-work. If we don’t look at the history, we will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of even lesser known people where no history is known…yet.
I am one person who hopes someday the uncertainty in our climate will be addressed and studied from a non-biased platform someday. I think it is important, but if what I said about the history is not taken into consideration, these scientists are doomed to repeat their mistakes forever. . . . This is why archaeology and history are important, the key reason, there are others, but the largest issues is to get personal bias out of the way and perform true science in other fields….
My son found this meteor crater on Google Earth.
29°27’7.32″N
103°48’12.15″W
We don’t have any Idea of it’s age.
Could it have caused the extinction ?
“FergalR says:
September 30, 2010 at 10:23 am
“Holliday and Meltzer believe that the disappearance of Clovis spear points is more likely the result of a cultural choice rather than a population collapse. ”
What sane civilization would abandon their most advanced technology?
”
Yeah, that would be like us abandoning something like the internal combustion engine. Who would even suggest something like that!
There are a few other ways that civilizations die out completely, such as war and/or disease.
CO2 changed didn’t u know, that’s why they disappeared.
mark nutley says: “…This is the important part, their arrow and spearheads were marvels of stoneage construct, they would not have stopped making them.”
Other than unsubstantiated assertion, what makes you say that?
We know the Clovis either moved on or where wiped out at about the time of the Younger-Dryas interstadial. We still don’t know the cause of the Y-D, although there are a few theories as to why it happened, it remains a mystery.
Until more information is found, the fate of the Clovis people is nothing better than guesswork.
RE: M White: (September 30, 2010 at 12:24 pm)
“ice age columbus”
Of course this all predates the time when the introduction of wheat farming, one of man’s first vitamin poor ‘junk foods,’ forced the evolution of a new race in northwestern Europe.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1210056/White-Europeans-evolved-5-500-years-ago-food-habits-changed.html
FergalR,
“What sane civilization would abandon their most advanced technology?”
They outsourced the manufacturing and ended up not being able to afford it??
So is there some reason why the CO2 counter is stuck at 389 and change, even though it is supposed to go up 2 ppm every year; and it hasn’t moved in eons ?
Does the Younger Dryas cold event really need any special explanation? Looking at the Greenland ice core data, all through the last glacial period, there were periodic sudden warming spikes (Dansgaard-Oeschger events) with a slightly less sudden return to very cold conditions.
The warming spike before the Younger Dryas was a little higher and longer lasting than the others, but I don’t see it as fundamentally different in kind. However, most interpretations seem to consider a full glacial-to-interglacial transition followed by some special event that reversed its effect.
The more there is the more plants eat it. What’s measured in the air is what they haven’t got their teeth around yet.
Quote:
FergalR says:
September 30, 2010 at 10:23 am
“Holliday and Meltzer believe that the disappearance of Clovis spear points is more likely the result of a cultural choice rather than a population collapse. ”
What sane civilization would abandon their most advanced technology?
***********************
Exactly FergalR !!! Like, why should our civilization give up coal and nuclear energy. Why should we give up nuclear weapons??
Why should anyone evolve and change and move on to better things that fit their needs and situations?
@ur momisugly Ben D. September 30, 2010 at 1:01 pm:
Ben, I hear you. But I’ve been following archeological stuff for 40 years now, and I gotta tell you – the more I see, the less I respect their work.
They sweep stuff under the carpet. Any artifact they don’t understand is a ritualistic item. Any building they don’t understand is a ritual center. Watch any presentation, and it is all extrapolation, with a lot of verb modifiers to cover their arses.
They got started with a bunch of rich white religious European guys with time on their hands and as superiority complex about western civilization – and a need to prove the validity of the Bible, especially after Darwin. They jumped to conclusions in the early-to-mid 19th century, which led them to date pottery and discovered written texts into a time scheme – and ever since then they’ve forced everything to fit into that timeline. They tweaked the scientific methods to fit the pottery and epigraphy, not the other way around.
But most of all, in N America they completely ignore ANY finds by amateurs. In Europe amateur finds are accepted and blended in (for the most part). There is solid evidence that humans were in Mexico 250,000 years ago. You know what happened to the arkie who did that work, and tested and retested her evidence before publishing? She never worked in archeology again. She made her evidence rock solid, and they hooted her out of her profession. And that is what they did to everyone for 70 years who dared to find evidence that humans were in the Americas before Clovis. Entrenched forces stood behind the Clovis barrier and spit on people. If I hear one more time about the “ice-free corridor” I will hurl. Every article about the peopling of the Americas has to have the obligatory bow to the ice-free corridor. Hey! People! You with the trowels! Clovis is dead! Get over it!
The DNA (mitochondrial haplotyping) has determined that at least FIVE different migrations came to the Americas. From Polynesia, SE Asia, Africa, NE Asia and Europe. And one they don’t know HOW it got here, really. The X-haplotype is found primarily in the Iroquois and Sioux, in the Levant, the Pyrenees, the Altai, and basically no where in between those – somehow it skipped all the geography in between and flew. Only one of those was likely to have been at the time of Clovis. The arkies for decades fought the idea of people using boats to get here – and now they are writing articles about it like they came up with the idea – which they didn’t.
They come up with rules about what they will accept – not about the science, but about staked out principalites of knowledge, and if you don’t toe their line, they will abuse you.
The CRU guys are PIKERS compared to arkies. That little naughtiness in the Climategate emails? Geez, that is nothing compared to what the arkies do.
Arkies are the only “scientists” who are still going by early-19th century dictates as to what is real and what isn’t. So, when they stop making stuff up (they call it extrapolating) and start giving credit to people of the past as being anything but ritualistic god-appeasers, then I will give them some credit.
40 years watching them, and I have an informed opinion. And that opinion is that they are historians claiming to be scientists. I am a FAR bigger skeptic in that area than in global warming. History according to the arkies is a lot less settled than the science of climatology is. But you wouldn’t know it to ask them.
I think that it is also worth mentioning that impacts are much more common than we are led to believe as astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer Bill Napier have tried to bring to light many times. Just yesterday an article was posted that brought this to light: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/215859-Disclosure-and-Comets
As feet2thefire mentioned above, it is not just the Clovis people who disappeared, but countless species of large mammals who disappeared at the same time. THAT has to be taken into account and hence coming up with a myopic hypothesis that only addresses the Clovis culture’s disappearance is not the answer when obviously more major events happened at the same time osit.
I see from the informed comments about this article that it is not just me who has a rather dim view of the achievements, nit picking and a**e covering consensus that has pervaded much of the scientific doctrines. Nigh on a century wasted on egos and isms.
The internet is now the only channel for free thought and idea exchange and that is under threat of control by many governments. Else where thinking outside the square can have you pilloried or worse. Thank you Anthony for the opening of debate, there is need of new ideas in all doctrines of science.
It wasn’t a ‘comet’. Why do these ‘scientists’ not recognize what a meteor storm did?
It is/was the Taurids Complex, and it will arrive again between now and a couple hundred years from now.
A couple years of airbursts and 100 meter sized ground impacts (at 25 mps) will end civilization as we know it.
Ask Harvard, the details are there.
Re: netdr2 says:
September 30, 2010 at 1:18 pm
“My son found this meteor crater on Google Earth.
29°27’7.32″N
103°48’12.15″W
We don’t have any Idea of it’s age.
Could it have caused the extinction ?”
That topographic feature is called The Solitario. It does resemble a crater, but it is actually an eroded laccolith. It is kind of like a failed volcano.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitario
“SOLITARIO. The Solitario, a circular domal uplift with a nine-mile diameter, stands on the Presidio-Brewster county line between Fresno Creek on the west and Saltgrass Draw on the east (at 29°27′ N, 103°49′ W). It was formed when an igneous intrusion uplifted the dome several thousand feet, vented lava, collapsed the roof, and left a prominent rim of Cretaceous limestone.”
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/rjs48.html
Fascinating argument, and I expect it to go back and forth many times over a very long time. It will be great fun to watch and participate in.
The notion that there have been catastrophic physical events that drive evolution is relatively new – last 30 years or so. The bias in the non-space science community is nominally against those explanations, yet in some instances (Cretaceous event, KT -Boundary, mass Permian extinction, Clovis) they may provide better models than previous explanations, which is why they are being entertained. The fun stuff is that when you get a sufficiently large catastrophic event – impact, volcanic or extra-solar – it seems to trigger other things that cause mass extinctions, global climate change, etc. And it is difficult to sort out which is causing what, especially since nobody was around at the time to watch. All in all, a great education in the scientific method and figuring out how things work. It’s something that the glo-warmers ought to consider participating in.
As to meteor storms not being associated with comets: the majority of meteor showers are associated with active or inactive comets. The dividing line between comets, asteroids and flying rubble piles is not as sharp as we once thought, as a large number (half?) of the Near Earth / Earth orbit crossing Asteroids are thought to be inactive comets. Cheers –
Spector says:
September 30, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Don’t quite see your point. The neolithic arrived in the British Isles about 6000 years ago
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba12/BA12FEAT.HTML
Even so the mesolithic lingered in the west.
“The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.”
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/10/mythsofbritishancestry/
Read Stephen Oppenheimer’s Orrigins of the British. An interesting read. It’s quite possible that the people of the British Isles are descendents of those Solutrean tool makers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean
At this time, I note that there are a host of explanations for the cause of the Younger Dryas ice-age, which is also, as well as man, is implicated in the wholesale disappearance of the American Megafauna. These explanations even include climate disruption by a nearby supernova that happened at about that time.
I also happened to note — while searching for information on the YD event — that there appear to be some people spreading a rumor that the BP oil spill may have caused a stoppage of the flow of the Gulf Stream current and, as a result, we may expect see the beginning of a return to ice-age conditions this winter. I do not see this claim being taken seriously.
RE: M White says: (October 1, 2010 at 10:41 am)
“Don’t quite see your point. The neolithic arrived in the British Isles about 6000 years ago.”
I believe your video depicts the neolithic peoples as modern Europeans before the adoption of wheat farming, about 5,500 years ago which put a high premium on gaining the ability to manufacture your own vitamin D directly from sunlight while almost fully clothed in a near sub-arctic climate. It is my understanding that DNA evidence shows that the neolithic Europeans at the time indicated in the video had typical solar protective skin coloration. This would make them similar, in appearance, to ‘Native’ Americans.
Besides the intensifying potential of the Taurids stream, there’s this:
“The Geminids are strong—and getting stronger,” says Cooke, who has prepared a plot showing how the shower has intensified since its discovery:
What’s going on? Jupiter’s gravity has been acting on Phaethon’s debris stream, causing it to shift more and more toward Earth’s orbit.
Moreover, says Brown, “the proportion of large, bright Geminids should also increase in the next few decades, according to Jones’ model.” So the Geminids could turn into a “fireball shower.”
“We understand little about the details of the formation and evolution of Phaethon’s debris despite many years of efforts.”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/08dec_geminids.htm
I would lot rather disappear underground without a furious panic trying to overrun me. Rather they were caught by surprise, especially any enemy, just sayin’.
Re feet2thefire’s post. Also entrenched is the dismissal of a people’s own traditions about their history, particularly so with the Indian subcontinent, which had its own centuries long traditions of teaching about life the universe and everything, and thought in terms of billions of years in creation cycles.
In the Hopi tradition they say they arrived around 22,000 years ago and entered the Americas by island hopping, sorry don’t recal whether it was SE or SW corner, and travelled up from there. They have oral tradtions of previous three ages to this fourth we’re in now.