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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Hg X is present in at least one Siberian population…
The Presence of Mitochondrial Haplogroup X in Altaians from South Siberia
That blog is 100% science fiction.
There is nothing mysterious about the “Chihuahuan Ignimbrites”… And the rhyolitic eruptions from which they were sourced occurred in the Mid-Tertiary…
Even if the mid-Tertiary ignimbrites of the Sierra Madre Occidental of western Mexico were caused by an extraterrestrial impact event, it would have happened ~30 million years prior to the extinction of the North American megafauna.
There is no such thing as imortality. Even the rocks of the Earth crumble to dust after few million years of exposure to the elements. Would you have us believe the vast ignimbrite sheets of North Central Mexico have remained undisturbed on the surface, and as pristine as the day they first cooled for more than 30 million years?. And for far longer than it has taken the Colorado River to gouge the Grand Canyon?
I should also point out that the hypothesis described in the Craterhunter blog is focused on the ignimbrite sheets of the Chihuahuan desert in the region between the Sierra Madre Occidental, and Sierra Madre Oriental. And not the volcanic deposits of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains.
Where do you and Crater Hunter think tuff comes from?
Pristine? Undisturbed?
Geology vs Mythology
So-called indigenous peoples of the America’s (as far as I know) have dark hair and eyes. Are some of you suggesting that only swarthy Northern Europeans took to the kayaks and crossed the Atlantic. You blue-eyed pillagers did get into the act 11,000 years or so later but, comon! Also, Greenland itself was colonized by Inuit some 4500 to 5000 years ago (it took a few thousand for them to work their way eastward from western NA. How come they didn’t run in to Blue-eyed Gringos from Europe when they got there? Has anyone done any DNA testing to discount this fanciful cluttering of pre-history.
Even after I specifically point out that the area of study described in the Craterhunter blog is not in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains, someone still feels the need to post a picture from there.
I get a kick out of folks trying to tell me that the Copper Canyon Tuff is the same geologic material as the pristine radial outwards flowing pyroclastic density current surrounding the mountain a couple of hundred miles away at 29.703101, –105.686395.
But folks should note that while the mountain is clearly the source location for the pristine radial curtain of pyroclastic materials, there is no vent there. It is not an ancient, eroded, volcanic structure.
Whatever produced that radial curtain of pristine pyroclastic materials, it wasn’t terrestrial volcanism.
And here I’d thought the “clovis first” meme had been overturned and dropped a number of years ago, based on several different lines of evidence! It is gratifying to see someone with a find such as Dr. Gustafson vindicated publically after all he was put thru.
I have many comment yet to read, so perhaps some of my following comments are already mentioned or addressed there.
As to the actual migration path that peopled the America’s – it seems to me that is still speculative, and there appear to be a number of different theories, each with associated advantages and drawbacks (see copied bit from the notoriously-inaccurate-but-oh-so-convenient-wikipedia below). To David Middleton – I was under the impression that so far geologists/specialists thought that the first time there had been open ground across the Bering land bridge and down into the main N. Am. continent was approx. 13,000 years ago. Pushing the time of migration back several thousand years would have meant the only route would have been over large distances of glacier – I find that far more difficult to believe than a sea route. Is there any evidence of an open pathway earlier?
I have to say the claims of primarily human caused megafauna extinctions are sheer speculation with little foundation. If one wants to use that idea, one also has to explain why elephants, lions, tigers, bears, elk, moose, bison, cougar, horses, camels, etc., all survived in very large numbers in various regions along the currently believed human migration routes. Perhaps the most difficult to explain is how elephants, camels, lions and other large mammels survived in Africa itself where human populations would have been the largest and longest established. Or, since humans migrating across the Bering land bridge would have first gone thru Asia, how tigers and elephants, etc. survived there.
There are reams of unexplained extinctions where it seems we can find little solid evidence for why those extinctions occurred – why, when there was so little difference and if anything it appears several other human like species were stronger and had larger brains, did Neaderthals, Denosovians, etc. go extinct while we didn’t? They were similar enough to us that we even successfully interbred with them, and gained from it (better immune systems), according to current DNA results.
It seems far better, to me, to simply state that the cause of these extinctions is unknown and there are conflicting theories as to what may have contributed to their extinction – rather than to make fairly definitive statements that can’t be substantiated and are highly speculative.
re: Gary Pearse says: November 3, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Gary, it’s believed from extensive DNA studies that the mutation causing blue eyes and blond hair first appeared roughly 10,000 years ago – and spread slowly. Prior to that, everyone had dark hair and eyes. So, for the timeframes currently believed involved in first migrations to the America’s, yep, apparently any N. Europeans who took to whatever type of boat they used to make their way over here would have had dark hair and eyes.
I meant to include the bit from Wikipedia beow in my November 3, 2011 at 1:21 pm post.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas#Watercraft_migration_theories
….Watercraft migration theories
Earlier finds have led to a pre-Clovis culture theory encompassing different migration models with an expanded chronology to supersede the “Clovis-first” theory.
Pacific coastal models
Main article: Coastal Migration
Pacific models propose that people reached the Americas via water travel, following coastlines from northeast Asia into the Americas. Coastlines are unusually productive environments because they provide humans with access to a diverse array of plants and animals from both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. While not exclusive of land-based migrations, the Pacific ‘coastal migration theory’ helps explain how early colonists reached areas extremely distant from the Bering Strait region, including sites such as Monte Verde in southern Chile and Taima-Taima in western Venezuela. Two cultural components were discovered at Monte Verde near the Pacific Coast of Chile. The youngest layer is radiocarbon dated at 12,500 radiocarbon years (~14,000 cal BP)[citation needed] and has produced the remains of several types of seaweeds collected from coastal habitats. The older and more controversial component may date back as far as 33,000 years, but few scholars currently accept this very early component.[citation needed]
Other coastal models, dealing specifically with the peopling of the Pacific Northwest and California coasts, have been advocated by archaeologists Knut Fladmark, Roy Carlson, James Dixon, Jon Erlandson, Ruth Gruhn, and Daryl Fedje. In a 2007 article in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, Erlandson and his colleagues proposed a corollary to the coastal migration theory—the kelp highway hypothesis—arguing that productive kelp forests supporting similar suites of plants and animals would have existed near the end of the Pleistocene around much of the Pacific Rim from Japan to Beringia, the Pacific Northwest, and California, as well as the Andean Coast of South America. Once the coastlines of Alaska and British Columbia had deglaciated about 16,000 years ago, these kelp forest (along with estuarine, mangrove, and coral reef) habitats would have provided an ecologically similar migration corridor, entirely at sea level, and essentially unobstructed.
Southeast Asians: Paleoindians of the Coast
The boat-builders from Southeast Asia may have been one of the earliest groups to reach the shores of North America. One theory suggests people in boats followed the coastline from the Kurile Islands to Alaska down the coasts of North and South America as far as Chile [2 62; 7 54, 57]. The Haida nation on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia may have originated from these early Asian mariners between 25,000 and 12,000. Early watercraft migration would also explain the habitation of coastal sites in South America such as Pikimachay Cave in Peru by 20,000 years ago and Monte Verde in Chile by 13,000 years ago [6 30; 8 383].
“‘There was boat use in Japan 20,000 years ago,’ says Jon Erlandson, a University of Oregon anthropologist. ‘The Kurile Islands (north of Japan) are like stepping stones to Beringia,’ the then continuous land bridging the Bering Strait. Migrants, he said, could have then skirted the tidewater glaciers in Canada right on down the coast.” [7 64]’
Atlantic coastal model
Archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley champion the coastal Atlantic route. Their Solutrean Hypothesis is also based on evidence from the Clovis complex, but instead traces the origins of the Clovis toolmaking style to the Solutrean culture of Ice Age Western Europe.[69] The theory suggests that early European people (or peoples) may have been among the earliest settlers of the Americas.[70][71] Citing evidence that the Solutrean culture of prehistoric Europe may have provided the basis for the tool-making of the Clovis culture in the Americas, the theory suggests that Ice Age Europeans migrated to North America by using skills similar to those possessed by the modern Inuit peoples and followed the edge of the ice sheet that spanned the Atlantic. The hypothesis rests upon particular similarities in Solutrean and Clovis technology that have no known counterparts in Eastern Asia, Siberia or Beringia, areas from which, or through which, early Americans are known to have migrated. The theory is largely discounted by most professionals for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the differences between the two tool making traditions far outweigh the similarities, the several thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean and the 5000 year span that separate the two different cultures.[72][73] Genetic studies of Native American populations have also shown the Solutrean theory to be unlikely, showing instead that the 5 main mtDNA haplogroups found in the Americas were all part of one gene pool migration from Asia.[74]
Problems with evaluating coastal migration models
The coastal migration models provide a different perspective on migration to the New World, but they are not without their own problems. One of the biggest problems is that global sea levels have risen over 100 metres since the end of the last glacial period, and this has submerged the ancient coastlines which maritime people would have followed into the Americas. Finding sites associated with early coastal migrations is extremely difficult—and systematic excavation of any sites found in deeper waters is challenging and expensive. If there was an early pre-Clovis coastal migration, there is always the possibility of a “failed colonization.” Another problem that arises is the lack of hard evidence found for a “long chronology” theory. No sites have yet produced a consistent chronology older than about 12,500 radiocarbon years (~14,500 calendar years)[citation needed], but South America has still seen only limited research on the possibility of early coastal migrations.
What “radial curtain of pristine pyroclastic materials?”
Enough with the Erik Van Danniken stuff already… The NE striking ridge that you seem to be focusing on is Cretaceous limestone & shale. Have you ever even looked at a geologic map of the region? The stuff surrounding it is Quaternary alluvium.
More Geology vs. Mythology
There are lots of volcanic and igneous outcrops in the area… All of them of Tertiary age and most rhyolitic… None of them are even remotely associated with impact-related geology.
Even tho I posted info on other possible migration routes, I believe that so far, genetic studies would support either Bering land bridge migration or sea coast/boat migration from Asia/Siberia. For example: http://csfa.tamu.edu/who.php (which I haven’t read completely, but it does have info on some of the genetics studies that have been done so far – not sure how current it is, however).
@Dennis Cox…
Quaternary alluvium is dirt… Your “ejecta curtain” is composed of dirt.
The “V-shaped excavations” (AKA arroyos) were cut by intermittent streams of water eroding through tilted sedimentary rocks.
You have misinterpreted simple Basin & Range-type geology as some sort of bizarre impact event.
This is funny stuff!
@Rational Debate, November 3, 2011 at 1:59 pm…
Yep. The evidence doesn’t preclude other scenarios; but it only supports entry from Beringia via the coastal and/or inland routes.
Mike McMillan says:
November 2, 2011 at 11:24 am
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.
__________________________________
HUH???
I know darn well there were cave bear because I have a tooth found in Alabama.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/carnivora/sabretooth.html
In my reading somewhere, I came across a comment about the major increase in wolves because of the American governments bison killing policy. (U.S. government’s weapon against the Plains Indian tribes by destroying their primary food source.) Hides were taken and the bodies were left for predators until only a small herd in Yellowstone was left.
If there was a change in climate killing off many of the herbivores over a relatively short period (a few decades) then you may have seen an explosion in the predator numbers from the easy meals followed by a hunting to extinction of the remaining herds after the “easy” food was no longer available.
The mammoths found frozen with grass in the mouth and stomach certainly points to a drastic and quick change in climate as does the Younger Dryas stadial.
I think the problem was a quick change in climate (loss of pasture) which could also weaken the herds and promote disease, and an increase in hunting pressure on a dwindling and weaker herd. Note that the Article I linked to earlier analysed the Mammoth and contrary to popular belief they were not an “Arctic” animal and the hair was unsuited to snow.
D Marshall says:
November 3, 2011 at 6:55 am
@Gail Combs What article has been “purged” from the internet?
Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried? – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution” http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=9986
The link will come up but the article is not the same. It has been Globull Warmilized.
I hate it when they do that!
Ignoring haplogroup X ans French cutting edge technology is not Science. Nor is the putting forward of Strawman Arguments re blue eyes. The early southern Europeans were not blue eyed.
Failure to address the Boneyards and Clovis layer is also surprising as a lot of rich data can be found there.
But thats what science is about, debate, claim and counter claim which throws up more ideas and links, which this post is rich with. Thanks guys.
Kennewick Man, poor soul why do they so fear you.
David Middleton says:
November 3, 2011 at 6:32 am
…..The highest modern concentration of Haplogroup X is found in the Druze of Lebanon. Traces of Haplogroup X in some modern American Indians, concentrated in the US Southwest, only provides evidence of an ancient connection to a rare haplotype found in Europe…..
_______________________________
The wiki [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_%28mtDNA%29%5D article shows the Haplogroup X as also concentrated on the east coast of N. America as well as in the Druze of Lebanon.
I resemble my grandfather, a Druze of Lebanon and I am forever getting people who say I look exactly like their cousin a Cherokee or what ever. I guess now I can tell them I am “distantly” related. chuckle.
Haplogroup X is also present in Siberia… http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1226041/
Its trace presence is not evidence of a Transatlantic migration from France to North America 11-24 kya.
Sprit Cave Mummy
Suggest you also look up Mummies of the Takla Makkan, In China, That shows possibly why Haplogroup X shows up there as well.
I dont take Wiki as a definitive source but it can provide reasonable background information.
Quote
Haplogroup X is also one of the five haplogroups found in the indigenous peoples of the Americas.[6] Although it occurs only at a frequency of about 3% for the total current indigenous population of the Americas, it is a bigger haplogroup in northern North America, where among the Algonquian peoples it comprises up to 25% of mtDNA types.[7][8] It is also present in lesser percentages to the west and south of this area—among the Sioux (15%), the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (11%–13%), the Navajo (7%), and the Yakama (5%).[9]
Unlike the four main Native American mtDNA haplogroups (A, B, C, D), and the Y-chromosome sub-haplogroup Q1a3a, X is not at all strongly associated with East Asia. The main occurrence of X in Asia discovered so far is in the Altay people in Southwestern Siberia,[10] and detailed examination[4] has shown that the Altaian sequences are all almost identical (haplogroup X2e), suggesting that they arrived in the area probably from the South Caucasus more recently than 5,000 BP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_%28mtDNA%29
unquote
So it seems that Haplogroup X only makes up 3% of the total original American continental population must is a much larger percentage of North American rising to 25% in one major tribe.
Its there, its substantial ,you cannot ignore it. How did it get there.
One thing to keep in mind when speaking of evidence of early ‘Caucasian’ peoples in America is that there is good reason to believe that the lack of solar-protective skin coloration that is now considered to be the hallmark of this racial group did not develop until wheat farming was introduced in the Baltic area. It is thought that this diet may have caused a endemic serious vitamin D deficiency condition to develop that forced the extreme shedding of solar-protective skin coloration (especially in winter) to maximize the production of vitamin D from sunlight.
MailOnline
White Europeans ‘only evolved 5,500 years ago after food habits changed’
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:58 PM on 31st August 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1210056/White-Europeans-evolved-5-500-years-ago-food-habits-changed.html
“One recent study in the U.S found that nearly half of African American women of childbearing age may be deficient in vitamin D.”
While this doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Altaian X could have arrived in Siberia later than in North America, it is far more likely that Altaian X was the source of Amerindian X.