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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@dp (November 2, 2011 at 9:38 am)
Certain types of climate changes will depress numbers, but not cause extinction. Humans were relying on depressed numbers at rates equilibrated during times of plenty. Remember that these are not equatorial regions, so the swings are more violent. You do what you have to do to survive in the face of extreme adversity.
@Hoser (November 2, 2011 at 4:01 am)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Haplogroup_X_%28mtDNA%29.PNG
The distribution suggests hypothermia resistance (and water-based migration & lifestyle), which wouldn’t be a surprising association with mitochondrial DNA.
@David Middleton
Interesting article.
The massive sea level and lake rises from 15,000 year BP to about 6,000 years BP would have caused massive human migration around the globe. Add in the warming and the release from ice of huge amounts of land and coastline. Whole ecosystems would have been on the move from land and sea side. You would have had an explosion in life on the land and in the sea. The geographic and resource changes would have drawn people like moths to a flame and once the urge to move begun, it would have favored the ones who moved the most. There is a term that translates to “arctic hysteria” in some Russian paleoarcheological studies about the explosion in art and tools among the Siberian tribes from this time. The sites depict a radical change in outlook as things got easier and food became very plentiful.
http://climatesanity.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/holocene-sea-level-rise-graph.jpg
“In the modern era even with extremely high human populations….Elephants, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, etc….. They are forms of mega fauna, and they are still with us…. Humans haven’t been able to drive them to extinction….. But change the habitat, and they are finished.”
The counter to this is that the animals in those areas evolved with the humans and learned to avoid them. African Elephants and Water buffalo are very aggressive.
In cases where people were not around, the fauna did not evolve a means to deal with people. So they were easy pickings. The demise of megafauna in Australia, NZ, and North & South America all coincide with the arrival of humans. The archeological record shows rise and use of tools designed for killing the large animals and the use of these tools stop when the mega-fauna is gone.
If you study hunting practices in North America, you will find that these groups were very mobile and very good at killing mega fauna. And they killed wantonly.
http://www.amazon.com/Bison-Hunting-Cooper-Site-Thundering/dp/0806130539
Analysis of the bones indicates a selective or “gourmet” butchering technique and offers insights into bison-herd demographics. Assessment of the projectile points suggests the movements of Folsom groups in relation to lithic sources.
Regarding African megacritter survival –
The elephants and rhinos lived out on the savannah, where humans would be prey to the large solitary and pack carnivores (lions, hyenas) that were wise enough to leave elephants alone. Hippopotamuses lived in crocodile-infested water, and were themselves big time killers of man, so the ancient Egyptians avoided them. Basically, man was as much prey as predator in Africa.
That wasn’t the case in the New World, where the only pack predators were wolves, which we domesticated to protect us from the undomesticated carnivores.
14,500 years ago, the Solutreans would have had to follow that sea ice from France to Nova Scotia. There was little, if any ice-free land in between Northern Europe and New York at the time of pre-Clovis and/or Clovis migration. Or, they would have had to cross the open Atlantic.
There is no archaeological evidence of Solutrean migration along the sea ice to the North America.
While I will stipulate that those scenarios are not impossible, the pathway from Siberia to North America was open and is littered with archaeological evidence of migration along that pathway.
Another interesting tidbit about human migrations. In India, the caste system is also stratified with European DNA. The higher in the caste system you go, the more European the DNA is. It’s theorized that this is because of Aryans. This word has fallen into disfavor now, for obvious reasons, and I can’t remember what the new term is. I’ll have to see if I can find the paper I read on this.
I have to agree with others, I do not like the “Blame humans” scenario. I have messed with cattle horses, goats and sheep. I have been stomped on, bit and knocked over by all four species.
This humorous story give a good look of what dealing with these animals is like: http://www.snopes.com/critters/farce/ropedeer.asp
You would have to be VERY desperate to tackle mega-fauna. I imagine they were hunted in the fall/winter so the meat would last. Otherwise the effort was not worth the trouble. Wolves also switch from mice and other small prey to caribou in the winter for the same reason, availability.
Disease or something else seems a much more likely option especially since frozen Mammoths have been found with grass in the stomach and in the mouth and the animals seemed to have died from suffocation. See: http://www.grahamkendall.net/Unsorted_files-2/A312-Frozen_Mammoths.txt
This Article has been “purged” from the internet.
Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried? – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
@ur momisugly Sleepalot “Except, of course, that Africa remains full of large, tasty animals.”
Actually, every continent on Earth has a bunch of large tasty animals. Even Antarctica has a few hundred. Of course, legal, religious, cultural, and epidemiological reasons prevent us from eating them. Also, some of them shoot back.
🙂
@johnmcguire.
The bible is a great place to go for spiritual enlightenment, but not so much for plate tectonics and anthropology.
With all due respect, Africa and South America broke apart some time during the Cretaceous period. Sometime between 65 and 145 million years ago (and yes, God, in all his glory, did this). However, that was a long time before humans were around.
Humans cleared of killing woolly rhino
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/humans-cleared-of-killing-woolly-rhino/story-e6frfku0-1226184151431
Climate change did it.
Although the news report contains no details on how they arrived at this conclusion.
The usual grant whoring twaddle IMO.
It’s not blaming humans. It’s simply a fact that the North American, South American, European and North Asian megafauna handled at least eight previous full glacial-interglacial cycles and all of the D-O interstadial/stadial cycles of the last Pleistocene glacial… Yet they rapidly went extinct concurrently with the rapid expansion of humans into Europe, North Asia and the Americas during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.
Certainly disease could have been a factor, humans and their dogs could have helped spread diseases into regions in which the megafauna had little resistance… But there is nothing climatologically unique about the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene; nor is the Younger Dryas stadial particularly distinct from previous stadials. The one thing that clearly changed was the expansion of human populations across the globe.
The ironic thing to me is… We (capitalists) are often lectured to about “noble savages.” Native Americans (AKA American Indians) respected the buffalo and other animals upon which they depended… Only taking what they needed to survive and frugally making use of every last bit of meat, bone, tissue and hide… While “pale faces” wantonly exterminated entire herds just for the skins. When in fact, the ancestors of those “noble savages” may very well have exterminated dozens of species of megafauna. Maybe they learned a lesson… And that’s why they developed such respect for the buffalo and other animals they hunted.
A fine, lively discussion in these comments. But re. Megafauna extinction, I must add one factor that may (or may not) be relevant. All Megafauna have a weakness that may have helped them become extinct: they take a long time to mature. If I wanted mammoth steak I’d hunt the babies. Tender, probably self-basting, easier to butcher into portable chunks, and deadly to any Megafauna species. Extinction wouldn’t take long, I think.
@ur momisugly pittzer Thank you for your courteous reply. You bring a point that has troubled me for years, and upon which I have done some reading. I accept that carbon dating seems fairly accurate and apparently can be used to go back a few thousand years. Possibly twenty thousand? I have read some about the theories based on gases found in rocks and upon deterioration at a supposedly set rate. Yet I have not read of any theory based on such things that has a proven method. I simply, perhaps some might think too simply, reject theories that date time into the hundreds of thousands and millions of years that have no method of proving themselves. I find such theories are used to conveniently invoke statements that the bible is not factual as a scientific reference. With all due respect , I remain open to instruction and enlightenment.
“David Middleton says:
November 2, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Gail Combs says:
November 2, 2011 at 11:48 am
I have to agree with others, I do not like the “Blame humans” scenario.
[…]
It’s not blaming humans.”
The real point is that it is neither at all feasible nor logical given all the easier food sources for man at that time and modern experience with the results of over hunting do not support the theory. It took train loads of hunters with modern firearms to kill off the majority of the American Bison and they are still around plus many believe that the fencing of the range and farming settlement had a major impact on their numbers. Hunters with scoped rifles can sit on prairie dog towns and shoot and shoot and not even reduce their numbers while the plague kills them ALL off very quickly.
Scattered bands of nomadic hunters with spears and “buffalo jumps” did not kill off all of the mega fauna of that time. Highly unlikely without other environmental factors playing a large part in their extinction. The American Indians (politically incorrect name I am sure) could not kill off the Bison with similar tools and techniques and there were probably many more of them following the herds and making their living in that manner than 12,000 years before.
Don’t have time to dig up the reference right now, but I vaguely remember some cave in Virginia? with very early habitation evidence and evidence of fire rings in South America from something like 20,000 years ago as evidence for much earlier habitation.
Also saw a fascinating article (which link I’ve since lost) that did a great job of showing evidence for a large rock fall from space hitting the ice shield of N. America as causal of the extinctions and with ‘facts on the ground’ including secondary cratering in the Carolinas pointing toward the impact site in Canada (with some smaller spalling having caused impacts in the southwest, giving a southwest to north east trajectory of the swarm, impact into the ice, and secondary ejecta landing as far away as the Carolinas.) Did in most of the Clovis people too.
So I think we’re a long way from saying “Asia only” on the source of Native Americans (AND their odd DNA markers from Europe…) and we’re even further away from Humans Caused Extinction (especially as we are lacking bone piles from all those various critters being eaten… but have them for other species being eaten…) North America has had a very “rich” history, but “out of Asia once and ‘people did it’ whatever it was” is not it… And if you don’t have boats in your chronology, you just are not in touch with what people do… What do we find buried in the sands with ancient Pharaohs? Boats. What is use by Eskimo and coastal Indian alike? Boats. What put folks on Iceland, Greenland, etc.? Boats. When were boats first used? Oh, we don’t know… Maybe we ought to ask the Australians if they walked to Australia 50,000 years ago…
So I’m glad to see that we’ve pushed things back a few hundred years more. Just 10,000 more years to go and we’ll be getting somewhere…
EM Smith, you are correct, there is a huge crater in Quebec, Pingualuit Crater, that is very young geologically speaking.
“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. ”
The best theory is one population came along the coasts, likely over the water. Another population appears to have come via the south Pacific, and possibly a third from Africa. There are vague hints of one coming from Europe, but the evidence isn’t as strong as the others.
One of the biggest issues is that no one’s ever identified a glacial-period “ice-free corridor” through Canada. That makes the coasts much, much more likely.
PIck up Elaine Dewar’s “Bones: Discovering the First Americans”.
In an echo of the AGW issue, here in the US the problem is the politicization of the science.
I have to admit certain reservations about the ice core temp data. In the last 10,000 years, the temp appears to have varied only 3 deg C from top to bottom for the whole period. The ice core data suggests that the temp varied by as much as 15 deg C in less than 1,000 years. Is that really plausible? Is the climate now not only more warmer but also more stable? I am inclined to doubt it. This suggests the ice core data is highly volatile and unreliable, really more about error bars than historical temperatures.
“Nick Shaw
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.”
The extinction was a geologically a sudden event, and happened between 13.8 and 11.4 thousand years ago.
The oldest domestic dog bone is 9,400 years old, and consists of a bone fragment discovered in a Texas cave.
Dogs radiating from Siberia to Texas, say 2,000 years?
So what if dogs were introduced at the same time as the extinction level event?
What if the dogs had rabies (from the arctic fox), distemper, parasitic roundworms, Bordetella bronchiseptica and a large number of other diseases that were not found in the large mammals in the America’s?
Asian and African elephants in captivity are kept well away from dogs and cats as these are reservoir species for many diseases that kill elephants.
Frankly I always wondered what mammoths could have lived on in a tundra environment. Something that big, and the other cool mega beasts, would have needed tons of vegetation.
Except, of course, that Africa remains full of large, tasty animals.
In Africa, the large tasty animals co-evolved with humans.
@Wayne Job,
Not certain where you got your info about Indegenous Australians being here only 30,000 years; latest evidence suggests over 78,000 years ago, making then part of the first migration out of Africa, before the land bridge between Australia and Asia broke apart. Also, some Dreaming stories vividly describe the megafauna of the time (giant kangaroo, giant wombats etc).
DNA evidence also suggests that time frame. AFAIK, no Neanderthal evidence.
“You would have to be VERY desperate to tackle mega-fauna. I imagine they were hunted in the fall/winter so the meat would last. ”
This is what atlatls are for. Killing from a distance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlatl
I watched a bison get killed with one and its very effective.
If you think megafauna is dangerous to a human on foot, watch a rodeo clown sometime. Now imagine a few of them with atlatls. Trivial.
Humans weren’t hunting sabre-toothed cats for food, why did they go extinct? Everything is always the fault of humans.
If humans hunted the animals that the sabre-tooth cats preyed on into extinction, then the sabre-tooth cats will also go extinct. Their dentition was uniquely formed to hunt mega-fauna, they couldn’t easily switch over to hunting smaller animals.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet was in the way.
You pre-suppose that the people involved had no knowledge of how to travel by sea. There most likely would have been many places along the shoreline where people could camp for a night, or a week, while hunting the seas.