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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Two things strike me from my limited understanding of such debates:
– there is little data, a bone or three here and there?
– would someone please explain to me how a limited number of humans equipped with weapons made of bone (not iron) extinguished a whole bunch of animals? Would they even want that much food?
I’m a version of Missourian on this one: “explain to me how ……”!
Sounds more like imagination running off into the tulip fields./
PS: Yeah, many of us tend to exaggerate – good to read David Middleton admitting that his “only viable pathway” should be “most likely pathway”, especially given my first point above.
PPS: Amazing to me that feces can be identified, some claim (another “explain to me” moment). The TIGHAR anthropological work on a South Pacific island they theorize Amelia Earhart perished on may be of interest to interested persons.
@Keith. Sketchley…
It’s important to keep my “only viable pathway” in context…
The article implied that the recent pre-Clovis discovery in Washington State somehow conflicted with the Beringia migration theory, which it did not. The recent discovery actually reinforces the Beringia migration theory. Thus far, no one has made a case that any other pathway was viable in the Late Pleistocene. We know for a fact that the Beringia pathway was viable.
It’s also important to keep my “modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction” in context too…
My intent was not to literally say that the megafauna were all killed with stone & bone tipped spears… But that the megafaunal extinction was pretty well coincident with the path and timing of the human migration. I’m sure that disease and habitat infringement played a role along with overkill… Asteroid and/or comet impacts might have also played a role; although evidence for these is extremely weak.
To Keith “Show Me” Sketchly:
Not being an expert I can’t give you the exact tally of how the discovered mammoth carcasses are known to have died. At least one skeleton was found impregnated by a spear point. One pair of adult males died with their tusks locked in combat. Others died apparently caught in storms at the outset of encroaching ice, or having fallen into crevasses. It’s said that recent Siberians ate the meat of frozen mammoths.
The fact that any mammoths are found to have been wounded or killed by humans strongly suggests that tens of thousands were hunted and killed–maybe millions. The notion that this was beyond the capacity of any population density should be weighed against the disappearance of a hundred billion passenger pigeons in the U.S. a century ago. These birds represent an extreme case. They nested on the ground in numbers so great that predators hardly made a dent in reproduction, but Americans brought their numbers below a safe threshhold, allowing predators to eliminate their nests.
See David Quammen’s “Song of the Dodo,” where he explains how you don’t have to reduce a population to the point that animals don’t find mates, you just have to reduce the genetic variability to a point where adaptation becomes improbable, and inbreeding becomes a necessity. Of course inbreeding would be fortuitous when finding mates becomes difficult.
The burden of proof is certainly placed on the doubters of extinction by hunting by the circumstance that the species survived in the most remote northern regions, most vulnerable to variable weather. This shows that mammoths could easily survive a winter without eating.
Early Americans used the meat, hide and bone, so that skeletons were even less likely to survive to give evidence of hunting. A census must take this into account and the fact that ice is the best preservative. The skeleton might be less likely to survive the hunters than the serendipity of natural preservation. But the coincidence of human arrival and megafauna extinction is quite adequate to establish that mesolithic technology was sufficient to account for it in North America. Humans arrive; big game disappear. –AGF
RE: David Middleton says: (November 7, 2011 at 2:40 pm)
“It’s also important to keep my “modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction” in context too…”
I wonder if there was a unique Asian Megafauna population, which was also driven extinct. It seems only those animals similar to the African Megafauna now remain extant.
BTW, I suspect that modern man, Homo sapiens, developed as a result of the rapid evolution of a small population that had been trapped in a restrictive and challenging environment. This could have been a small African offshore island or desert oasis.
Can’t resist entering this fascinating discussion again – especially following Spector’s comment about the development of modern man. Please take a look at my book Mr Brouard’s Odyssey or
http://www.billbrouard.com. The latter was created by my brother for my father some time ago but it is worth reading – it has nothing to do with creationism which someone once said the website looked like – but is an anaylsis of his research. I just wish Dad was alive to participate in the debate. He would have relished it.
I was/am a journalist and wirter, not an academic, so although I respected my father’s research and shared his enthusiasm, I just wrote things down. But please do have a look at his work. The book is on Amazon.
Just in case others reading this blog have not had the chance to read Diana Winsor’s book about her father’s research – it is well worth the effort….Or look at the website she mentions for a summary of the basic ideas.
Diana is right about Spector’s comment – the Indian ocean island group being inundated and stimulating a migration – by BOAT! Funny how the sea is never mentioned as a way of moving. Coastal migration is the easiest – but it will leave little or no records! Boats get broken up, sunk, rotted away but that does not mean they did not exist! And the sea is a constant source of food – and does not require adaptation to different species of plant and animal food.
And why should there be one method only?
If there is one comfort in all this, it is that the amateur is often right and the professional comes along later to explain how it happened scientifically. And then claim the credit…
Chase the links and get hold of a copy of the book – it could change your perspective. It is in novel form but that just makes it easier to read and absorb – plus it is moving, as Diana has written it partially as a biography of her father, who comes alive in the pages.