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.
mark nutley says:
September 30, 2010 at 10:35 am
Interesting but they are missing the obvious thing, The clovis disappeared, this is indicated not be the fact they upped sticks and moved but the fact that the clovis type of arrow head vanished. This is the important part, their arrow and spearheads were marvels of stoneage construct, they would not have stopped making them. They died in a mass extinction event, along with all most of the other animals in north america at the time.
You raise a very good point, a point seemingly missed by posts both before your own, and many afterwards.
The point being: THE CLOVIS POINT vanished. But why? Why would such a successful tool simply vanish? I’ll tell you why: The makers vanished.
I can’t recall of a period in Human history where a technology was completely, totally, and utterly abandoned in the name of another technology.
There have ~always~ been the clingers on to what went before, and that is evident by finding both together. Indeed: The genesis of the one is found in the other, and so the ‘lineage’ is discovered.
What bothers me here, is that there are so many posters whom are willing to accept a remark a face value, and not think to cogitate at length over what seems to be a logical and reasoned construct, but may well be so faulted as to be a neat deceit.
Further, has no one thought to question the impetus of the authors of that article?
Does NO ONE REMEMBER the lack of WOOLEY MAMMOTH FARTS article but a few months back, as being the cause of the last big ice age?
Here’s my take: The authors of the current article are nought but takers of money from those whom would deceive us into believing their connivances.
Believe what you will, but do so at your own peril.
Brego says:
September 30, 2010 at 12:12 pm
The Goshen cultural complex was contemporaneous with the late Clovis culture and continued for hundreds of years after Clovis was gone. It would be difficult explaining why a comet impact would have exterminated one group and not the other.
The comet impact conjecture was never anything more than a pipe dream.
Shall we —most of the rest of us— consider that you’ve never heard of ‘weather patterns?’
Does an effect happen all over the world all at once? Does what happens in say, Perth, Australia, also happen at Svalbard, and Tierra del Fuego too, in the very same way?
899 says,
Here’s my take: The authors of the current article are nought but takers of money from those whom would deceive us into believing their connivances.
Exactly what I was getting at, and now the USAF won’t allow anyone else to survey/study fireballs with their radar equipment anymore. Period. Its kinda Fishy!
Here is a reference to the supernova magafauna extinction theory. It has the advantage that it neatly explains why only one hemisphere of the Earth, north to south, might receive the worst brunt of the initial blast. Although it is speculated that such a blast may have created comet-like objects, I suspect that supernova remnants, from 250 light years out, could easily fail to pass the tests required of a true comet impact signature. They appear to have discovered three distinctive radio-carbon peaks; 41,000, 34,000, and 13,000 years old.
Supernova Explosion May Have Caused Mammoth Extinction
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/NSD-mammoth-extinction.html
RE: FergalR: (September 30, 2010 at 10:23 am)
“What sane civilization would abandon their most advanced technology?”
I believe this could happen as a result of that technology no longer being applicable to their drastically modified lifestyles. That period saw the disappearance of the American Megafauna from North to South America. If the Clovis people survived whatever caused this extinction, perhaps including human hunting pressure, it seems to me that the survivors could have found that the large spears and arrows using these complex artifacts were no longer suited for hunting the small game that survived.
As an example; I suspect that a scarcity induced price of $90 per gallon for gasoline in today’s dollars would force the discontinuance of the general use of that fluid and most of the associated advanced technology.
Ben D. says:
Starting in around 1900, major scientists have flip-flopped from global cooling to global warming every 30 years like clock-work.
Or could it even be like the Pacific decadal oscillation 🙂
The evidence for the extinction event, of ice age fauna and demise of Clovis culture and Younger Dryas in the northern hemisphere, is for a comet cause, from the nano diamonds finds. An old TV programme repeated a couple of days ago reminded me of this, it ended with a piece on the Greenland finds which had a layer abundant with them.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090101172136.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100914143626.htm
The only unique aspect of Clovis is the percussion fluted projectile point. When you carefully look at specimens from locations spanning the entire continent, it is fairly clear that Clovis was not a homogeneous entity distributed continent wide. Point size and manufacturing patterns vary geographically, and through time. The fluted character of Clovis spear tips is so well known that it has achieved a quasi-mythical character. In fact, while Clovis fluting can be very clear on some specimens, on others there can be considerable debate. The “fluted-ness” grades gradually into “end-thinned” or “basally-thinned” points where no unequivocal fluting can be found. At the same time new fluted forms such as the Cumberland and Folsom appear, which are fluted, but are fluted in a different manner – probably using a pressure technique. Folsom points in fact are arguably technologically more sophisticated than Clovis were. Since Folsom appears late in the Younger Dryas, the human population in the Americas not only survived the onset of the YD, they also continued to innovate and develop new means of securing blades to hafts, which is absolutely all the “flute” on a fluted point is – haft attachment point. Evidence of scratching on the flute surfaces of obsidian Clovis points in the western US indicates that adhesive was applied to the flute during the hafting process. By the onset of the Holocene the fluting technique was entirely abandoned. There is no evidence of an extinction of Clovis people or hiatus of human occupation in the Americas. The people do however have to cope handily with extreme changes taking place during the onset, duration and ending of the YD.
The archaeologically interesting thing about the fluted point is that it is an American invention. It occurs only in the Americas. The speed with which fluting appears through out two continents suggests to some archaeologists that communication, rather than colonization, was the mechanism that distributed the “Clovis” point so widely.
Well, I think Steve Pace has put two and two together pretty darn well. He did his homework.
I don’t know about supernova, does anybody? Is anyone here old enough to lived through a nearby supernova and is qualified to describe it?
Anyway, here’s the Harvard link on that supercomet that was running around our solar system.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/seri/MNRAS/0251/0000636.000.html
And Bill Napier’s Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex
Or A Catastrophe of Comets
wow, Thanks, Dennis!
and here’s the simple (with mistakes) article about the periodic meteor bombarment:
http://stevepace.intuitwebsites.com/
The critics of the supernova theory say that there appears to be no evidence of any nearby supernova remnant that might fit the time of the event even though there is evidence of a radio-carbon peak that might have been caused by a supernova. Of course there is also the remote possibility of a ‘hypernova’ much farther away.
“It’s A Nova … It’s A Supernova … It’s A HYPERNOVA”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/04/030407075127.htm
I read somewhere where just an objects passage through the Van Allen Belts would cause a spike of that type. The particle flux is so high in some region that often the detectors on satellites must be shut off (or at least placed in a “safe” mode) to protect them from the radiation.
Not to mention the Gould Belt at some point(s) in comets’ histories.