Guest Post by David Middleton
From The Seattle Times
SEATTLE (AP) – It’s not unusual for an archaeologist to get stuck in the past, but Carl Gustafson may be the only one consumed by events on the Olympic Peninsula in 1977.
That summer, while sifting through earth in Sequim, the young Gustafson uncovered something extraordinary _ a mastodon bone with a shaft jammed in it. This appeared to be a weapon that had been thrust into the beast’s ribs, a sign that humans had been around and hunting far earlier than anyone suspected.
Unfortunately for Gustafson, few scientists agreed. He was challenging orthodoxy with less-than-perfect evidence. For almost 35 years, his find was ridiculed or ignored, the site dismissed as curious but not significant. But earlier this month, a team that re-examined his discovery using new technology concluded in the prestigious journal Science that Gustafson had been right all along.
The pierced bone was clear evidence that human beings were hunting large mammals in North America 13,800 years ago _ about 800 years before the so-called Clovis people were thought to have migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia.
The announcement came as sweet vindication for the now-retired Washington State University professor.
“I was pretty bitter about the whole thing for a long time,” Gustafson, 75, recalled last week. “I don’t like saying it. I never really admitted it except to my wife. It was so frustrating. But I’m very humbled and happy it turned out this way.”
20 October 2011
Old American theory is ‘speared’
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end – once and for all – a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.
The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.
This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent’s original inhabitants.
News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.
In truth, the “Clovis first” model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.
A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this – perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.
The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.
[…]
The timing of humanity’s presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.
Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) – all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.
A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role – as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.
“Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago – that’s the end. They finished them off,” said Prof Waters.
“You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time,” he finished. “But there’s nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it’s time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that.”
First things first… This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway. Pushing their migration back in time a few thousand years into the Pleistocene just means that the first wave arrived before the Bølling /Allerød interstadials during the Oldest Dryas instead of during the Younger Dryas.
The Real Clear Science link to this article was titled, “First Americans Not From Siberian Land-Bridge.” The BBC reporter seemed to draw a similar erroneous conclusion… “In truth, the ‘Clovis first’ model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.” The paper in Science is behind a pay-wall; but the abstract doesn’t seem to cast any doubt on the Bering land bridge theory. The significance of this discovery is that the Anthropocene may have begun much earlier than previously thought… At least several thousand years before mankind discovered capitalism…
Science 21 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6054 pp. 351-353
DOI: 10.1126/science.1207663
•Report
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington
Michael R. Waters1,*, Thomas W. Stafford Jr.2,5, H. Gregory McDonald3, Carl Gustafson4, Morten Rasmussen5, Enrico Cappellini5, Jesper V. Olsen6, Damian Szklarczyk6, Lars Juhl Jensen6, M. Thomas P. Gilbert5, Eske Willerslev5
Abstract
The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.
A previous post of mine, Run Away!!! The Anthropocene is Coming!!!, drew some criticism about my assertion “that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction.” My comment was at least somewhat sarcastic… And yes, I do know that the human migration out of Africa began long before the Holocene, but, it is a simple fact that mastodons, stegodons and mammoths had “weathered” all of the prior Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles just fine. The only major distinction between the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and the previous glacial-interglacial transitions was the migration of humans out of Africa, across the world and the demise of most of the mega fauna that were in the path of that migration…
While I may profusely ridicule the notion that mankind’s industrial activities over the last 200 years have given rise to a unit of geological time, distinct from the Holocene… I fully believe that mankind’s conquest of Earth since the late Pleistocene is the only thing that truly distinguishes the Holocene from previous Quaternary interglacials.
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It is ludicrous how anthropologists deny that man was responsible for the mass extinction, when it so obviously was the case. Climate was irrelevant in “recent” (c 100,000yr) times.
David,
there are some who theorise that Clovis came from Southern France in Europe due to flints spearheads found in France looking very similar to those in North America, whereas there is no such technique for making the same flint spearheads in Asia. As there was a huge expanse of ice between North America and Europe this gives hunters a vector to get to America via small boat in the same way the eskimo peoples have migrated. Additionally European DNA/Mitochondria has been found in some native people in that could not have got there in the European migration of the last 1500 years.
This also undermines the traditional theories.
As an archaeology student (third degree after science and business studies) it is obvious that archaeology is full of paradigms that are all but impossible to shift. So, I was intrigued by this notion that it was only possible for humans to reach America via a land bridge. I may be daft, but people have been floating around on rafts or other boats from well before any available records (there are numerous examples of islands being colonised).
All it takes is for a group to hunt at the edge of the ice … to camp on the ice and they will eventually migrate along the ice edge to the Americas.
It even struck me the other day, that just as seal pups in the UK are said to be white as a hangover from the last iceage … that Scandinavians may be blond because dark hair stands out in the snow. … which would suggest Eskimos/Inuit would be blond … so don’t take it too seriously!
The truth is that throughout archaeology there are these illogical paradigms based on not much more than someone’s reputation (often 19th century or earlier). As a Scot, the obvious one is the “celtic” nature of Scotland. The truth is that there is not one single bit of evidence linking any historical record of a Kelt to Scotland.
From the article:
“First things first… This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway.”
—————————————————————————————————-
Wrong.
Some researchers suggest, that hunters following marine mammals with boats or on foot along the ice-rim of the then-ice-covered Northern Atlantic from East to West during the last glacial may have preceded the Clovis-people in Northern America, because the european “Acheuleén”-hunting culture and their respective stone tips MUCH MORE resemble the stone tips of Clovis spears than the rocky tools used by siberian people during that time, which were used to use small stone chips, which were glued on a shaft with birch-tar, instead of solid, manufactured flintstone-points.
“This ‘discovery’ does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway.”
OK… Instead of, “It remains the only viable pathway,” I should have written, “It remains the only most likely pathway.” The evidence does not preclude other migration scenarios.
But, the pre-Clovis human DNA evidence is consistent with migration via the Bering land bridge…
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I thought the Clovis came from Southern France, as the tool-making technology and the tools themselves are the same for both people, and the era is likewise the same.
It is said that the French Clovites kyaked along the southern ‘shores’ of the northern ice cap, from France to America, somewhat like the modern eskimo lifestyle (in a journey taking many years). This would presuppose that Clovites could make a seal-skin kyak, which, seeing the level of skill in their spear heads, is not impossible.
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Considering that the indigenous people of the Americas are so dissimilar in appearance from north to central to south it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that they came from all over from different direction at different times.
It strikes me as odd that with so many different varieties of humanoids that sprung from the existences of “monkeys” gone ape-bonkers around gorillas, that has been around for some 800 000 years only some monkeys made it to south america 40 millions years before on rafts of vegetation over the atlantic according to wikig’damnpedia.
They had to have 40 million years of evolution, 40 million years of looking at monkeys leaving ’em behind on haphazard natural formed crude raft, to be able to postulate the idea that they could walk across by scaling mile high ice, through blistering cold and horizontal hale storms, through herds of weird ginormous beasts, all the while battling other ape turned to humans, to get to the promised land?
I ask myself, why do they call the apes the smart ones?
When the oceans are the odd 150 to 200 metres lower in an ice age, you can almost walk to America from Australia. It would be interesting to see a profile of what is above the water with this huge drop in ocean levels. If the oceans dropped that much I could almost ride a motor cycle from Australia up through Asia to Europe.
If people can see land across the water they will be curious, once they get there, if they see more land they will be curiouser, and so forth. Hence they move and occupy.
Australia has been populated twice before European settlement, the original inhabitants some what like neanderthals, heavy boned and thick skulled. I have yet to find a time frame from our researchers of when they arrived, probably early on in the last ice age. The present aboriginal people arrived around 30,000 years ago and the original inhabitants disappeared rather quickly except in Tasmania. These people did not know how to make fire and had very primitive tools, that would explain their downfall.
History of ancient travels and peoples is a guessing game and recent achaeology would tend to suggest that very advanced civilizations have come and gone over very large time frames. Looking at some ancient sites our engineers today cannot construct what the ancients did, makes you kind of wonder.
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You know I have always had a problem visualising this Younger Drias Clovis scene in France.
Here we have the glaciers extending down to London, and the ice-pack down to France, while the Sun was blazing down from high in the sky during a Delightful Franco summer. This is not the Actic land of permanent winter darkness, so why was it quite so cold for an ice-pack to survive this solar onslaught?
Was the Sun dimmed? Was the atmosphere really dry, so no greenhouse water vapour to keep the atmosphere warm? But if the atmosphere was dry, that blazing Sun could easily make it moist again. CO2 was not a governing factor, as there was plenty of that around. Even a stuttering Atlantic Conveor / Gulf Stream would not stop the Sun blazing down at French latitudes.
So why so cold that ice packs floated around balmy La Rochelle? Any enlightenment?
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Genetic evidence does not exclude a European component in the pre-columbian populations of North America. The X haplogroup is more associated with eastern North America. It isn’t surprising that older DNA evidence from Oregon is asian. This sample is presumably from only one human. Most aboriginal american DNA is of the A, B, C and D haplogroups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_(mtDNA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Amerindian_genetics
I found a pretty good article on the topic. The story is complicated, and yet there is a relatively clear statement:
These findings leave unanswered the question of the geographic source of Native American X2a in the Old World, although our analysis provides new clues about the time of the arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas. Indeed, if we assume that the two complete Native American X sequences (from one Navajo and one Ojibwa) began to diverge while their common ancestor was already in the Americas, we obtain a coalescence time of 18,000 ± 6,800 YBP, implying an arrival time not later than 11,000 YBP.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180497/
The authors suggest the X2 haplotype migrated across Siberia, but left essentially not trace. Their work does not exclude the possibility of pre-columbian European migration to North America. Keep in mind that mitochondrial DNA doesn’t mix or recombine with other DNA. It is passed intact only through mothers. If Europeans did come early to North America, they came as familes, not just as a hunting or raiding party of men.
NZ Willy says: November 2, 2011 at 12:18 am
“It is ludicrous how anthropologists deny that man was responsible for the mass extinction, when it so obviously was the case. Climate was irrelevant in “recent” (c 100,000yr) times.”
Except, of course, that Africa remains full of large, tasty animals.
So thats why all the elephants are extinct in Africa and Asia. Modern stone age hunters. not Neanderthals, Peking Man or Java man or even Davidsovians. All those mega mammals lived in USA until Clovis man arrived. Seems that Clovis man did not eat bison or elk or deer only mega mammals. But i seem to recall that Clovis man went extinct about the same time.
Fake science, fake assumptions, are the same in every field.
Jack and Dave can make a simple crop circle thus they made every crop circle.
Have we not moved beyond that grade of science?
I am more worried about the politicene era. In the anthropocene era, humans can change the temperature and climate.
In the politicene era, politics can change the temperature.
(adjustments as required)
What I don’t understand is why Mastodons etc when there were plenty of deer and buffalo. Elephant isn’t a food source in Africa, maybe mastodons were an easy kill? If you read Lewis and Clark’s journal the plains were a veritable cornucopia of meat. Humans weren’t hunting sabre-toothed cats for food, why did they go extinct? Everything is always the fault of humans.
Lastly…still around after 14K yrs? Looks like they didn’t meet their RDA of fibre either.
The cave-dwelling pre-Clovis and Clovis were hunting animals to extinction and the greens want us to go back living in the caves? It seems that cavemen cause more extinctions than modern homo sapiens.
“ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2008) — DNA from dried human excrement recovered from Oregon’s Paisley Caves is the oldest found yet in the New World — dating to 14,300 years ago, some 1,200 years before Clovis culture — and provides apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia, according to an international team of 13 scientists.”
If it’s ever possible, I’d like to see the test results from some east coast human DNA from the same time period.
“The truth is that there is not one single bit of evidence linking any historical record of a Kelt to Scotland”
but I think I have heard something about Kilts.
The megafauna of Africa and human ancestors had co-existed for at least several hundred thousand years. As humans spread out through Africa and South Asia, the megafauna had time and space to adjust to human predation. The megafauna of North America, Europe and North Asia had far less time and space (suitable habitat) to adapt to human predation.
The Clovis people did not go extinct…
Why is it that science has to find a single cause for everything. Maybe man did hunt some species to extinction, maybe climate changed too rapidly for some species to adapt, maybe they overpopulated depleting food sources so some species starved to death, maybe volcanic activity played a role, maybe water sources dried up, etc. etc.
Carl Gustafson had to wait nearly 35 years to be told he was right all along. Mr. Watts I hope you’re a very patient man.
Color me skeptical that humans were the cause of mass extinction of all the mega animals of the Americas. Considering the number of humans involved and the tools they had at their disposal, it just doesn’t seem to make sense that the large animals were hunted to extinction while essentially similar animals in other parts of the world, much more populated with humans, were not.
I cannot postulate on what really caused such a die off but, human hunting? I don’t think so.
There are grievous problems with the current state of early man’s history. It is patently obvious that humans were in the Western Hemisphere before the land bridge theory timeframe. How it is still considered orthodox is beyond me. The techonology, and more importantly, the similarity in technology, mythology and construction, of early civilizations have an awful lot in common. There are also numerous sites, many underwater, that turn traditional dating on its head. Also the recent discovery of Gobekli Tepki in Turkey, 7000 years older than the pyramids, simply shattered the widley held notions of man and technology and religion.
Right now the past is the future, between archaeology and astronomy all kinds of “settled science” is being uprooted and turned to fodder.
A minor and trivial point for anyone who may discuss this and related articles: The name of the town near the Manis site, Sequim, is pronounced as “squim”, with the ‘e’ being not just silent, but totally ignored.
“This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway.”
Of course it remains the only viable pathway. /sarc off
After all, we know those Polynesian folks weren’t navigating hundreds, even thousands, of miles in across the ocean in small hand-made vessels. Wait. What’s that? They were? Rats.
Ralph B says:
November 2, 2011 at 5:31 am
“Humans weren’t hunting sabre-toothed cats for food, why did they go extinct?”
It could be because there are two reasons a predator (including humans) will kill. One is food. The other is protection. Humans aren’t the only species that will actively hunt out and destroy other species that pose a threat.
Not that that proves anything.
Dave says
Quote
The megafauna of Africa and human ancestors had co-existed for at least several hundred thousand years.
Unquote
As they did in Europe and Asia with Neanderthals etc, with their very strong spears and tools and very successful time span, far in excess of the short time we have been around. So the millions of bison adapted to modern humans but the rest did not.
Sorry I dont buy it, if for no other reason than it lacks simple logic. The Tools replacing Clovis have been identified, made by french tourists from the South of France. Lots of holes in the “standard Model”.. Methinks a better more interesting and vibrant picture is emerging