posted
Interesting. Thanks for the link. I'll be pretty curious to hear what kind of dates further testing provides too. Always fun having existing ideas smashed to the ground by new evidence!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I am taken back to what one of my archaeology professors once said in one of my graduate-level classes.
"Finding new evidence that moves dates dramatically is exciting, but it also is an opportunity to make grave errors. We should always beware of any single find that creates a major paradigm shift, as so many times the cause is hoax, error, or poor methodology." Paraphrasing, of course, but it was a powerful discussion and I think I'm close on the wording.
We were discussing the changes to neolithic chronologies arising from the discovery of the Alpen mummy later named Ötzi the Iceman. Those changes were considerably more minor than 25,000 years.
I'm not saying that the find is wrong, but that the evidence is new, and that a 25,000 year change in the date of human settlement of North America will require careful examination.
posted
Yep, I agree, this would be a major shift... almost too major. While I'd love to hear the old timelines turned over (just for the horizons it broadens), chances are that there is something here that is an anomaly.
Posts: 472 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Oh, yeah, of course the new find should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. It would be foolish not to.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Well, I found, way back when I was still an archaeologist, that people would often take these things at face value. I just wanted to be sure that I put that out there.
Posts: 720 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
There's a fascinating little tidbit hinting at the the self-fulfilling prophecy and why all sites believed to be earlier than Clovis are relatively recent ones:
quote:Goodyear dug four meters (13 feet) deeper than the soil layer containing the earliest North American people and began uncovering a plethora of tools. Until recently, many archeologists did not dig below where Clovis artifacts were expected to be found.
In other words, there wasn't any evidence of earlier settlements because mostly the evidence wasn't being sought.
I suspect there will be a lot more reexamination of rich sites over the next few years to find evidence of earlier tool-using humans hanging about. Could be that this most recent find doesn't bear up, but it could also be they'll start finding similar stuff when they dig deeper at existing sites.
Not that the controversy will completely disappear. I think there's been controversy with the other sites mentioned in the article - it can be difficult to tell the difference between a primitive (and faulty, since these are probably discards) chert tools and chert pieces that shattered in ways that would just make them handy tools.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I think a look into landform ideas about the 50k date is warranted.
And I've handled very primitive stone tools, and they can be really very simple. But I agree that it is in most cases easy for the trained eye to spot a manufacturing area as opposed to a natural scatter of chert edges cause by glacial or other forces causing flaking. If the artifact density is as high as they are claiming, it's sure to be obvious. I've made chert tools, and it gets pretty messy.
The one thing is that chert is very well suited to tool use because it naturally prone to breaking and flaking in ways that make an edge. So it can be difficult to really easily identify an isolated find.
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