Pre-Clovis article...

[Mud Hawk]

Originally Posted by uniface

Well, either data are data, or they're not.

Only when we are willing to rethink what has been instilled as fact.

Even if you were to settle on a median of time periods between the two, they still equate to "pre-clovis". Artifact remains in an undisturbed soil core before clovis level. By all means I am unqualified to speak as I am just learning... No offense to anyone.

[joshuaream]

You are starting to see some South American Archaeologists who did their post-graduate work in Europe vs the US who are willing to look at extremely early dates without the bias that most North Americans (myself included) would have when we see crude looking flakes and old dates (40,000 years ago.) They no longer need to send their samples to be dated in the US, they no longer need to publish in US literature, they no longer need US research dollars and they are loud and proud... And like Rok, they are not afraid applying Levallois technological terms to what they are finding.

The Brazilians especially are really going hard on a limestone rich, cave riddled region in central Brazil. After the initial dismissal of the Pedra Furada site we didn't hear much more about them, but it's fascinating that more human remains from the Paleo era have popped up in these caves than in the US. Garrincho Cave is one in particular that has produced part of a human skull and teeth that are solidly pre-Clovis from the c-14 dates. The lead archaeologist thinks that people came down around 150,000 years ago (based on the density of sites, and a computer program that modeled expansion rates from Alaska down to Brazil.) They still have deeper cave strata to go into. There are about 500 caves in the park, and potentially tens of thousands of more caves across an area larger than Texas.

Google Guarrincho Cave, you should be able to find a the pdf of the Mammoth Trumpet with the C-14 dates, calendar dates, etc.

[CMD]

Originally Posted by joshuaream

I used to think that, but when you see how far south they went they would have bumped into the ice-age at that end of the world. And gone through glaciers in the mountains in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. (Heck, there are still some huge Glaciers near these sites.) They would have had to come in and move fast in a straight line down to Chile (almost passing by perfectly nice habitation areas with lots of game.) And then turn around a come back again.

The more I look at it, I think their was a Pre-pre-Clovis group that was here significantly earlier than our Pre-Clovis dates. Or thousands of people came streaming through and scattered.

A single, healthy group could have walked/rafted strait down from Alaska to Chile relatively quickly. But to come to the number of sites, spread east to west and north to south you need more than the couple thousand years that currently split solid Pre-clovis from Clovis.

Well, rather then overland, perhaps they arrived by following a seaweed highway:

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index....g-the-americas

[uniface]

There are two interesting things about that article.

The first is that they had to convene a summit conference of the biggest deals in archaeology, who had the most impressive affiliations. Once they said it was OK, then everybody else could accept it. This is an example of the way a belief system -- the secular equivalent of a religious faith -- behaves. Science (supposedly) goes by evidence and lets the consequential chips fall where they may.

The second is that, while they've pushed the time horizon back a good distance, they're still operating out of the assumption that people in the Western Hemisphere must have come from somewhere else. WHY ?

[joshuaream]

The sea-weed idea makes some degree of sense to me, but it rests on two assumptions that I am not sure have been studied. First, you have very deep water near the west coast not the shallow shelf like Florida. If you drop the water level massively you loose the little bit of shelf where kelp grows and hit deep water that much closer to the shore. Did the kelp forests exist in the similar way they do today (or did 200 years ago?) At least along the Alaska portion the water would have been much colder with an ice shelf jutting out into the water, like shown on their map, I doubt the water in front of that ice was as kelp rich as it is today.

Second, I have an issue with the time line. If a population did establish itself in a rich environment like that, why continue the rush down to Monteverde? Assuming they set up camps like they did at Monteverde, exploited similar resources, then they were more than just mobile hunters sleeping where the night caught them. If a group of people (or many groups) did populate the coast that way, I would think it took them longer than a couple hundred years to do so. The other part that is often over looked about Monteverde is that they used a thick bodied lance type point technology (like Jobo, Haskett, and Mesa.) Those types are also found inland very significant distances from the coast.

Homo erectus made it to Northern China by 700,000 years ago, and H. erectus had raft or boat technology to get to some islands. A lot more can happen in 700,000 years than in 30,000. The more that I look at this, the more I think 50 years from now we are going laugh about our assumptions of when man entered the Americas much the same way our idea of the age of earth has changed in the last 100 years. (It went from 4,000 years old to 4 billion years old pretty quickly.)

[lillyput]

So guys, what do you think about Calico?