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Old May 16th, 2011 #41
Alex Linder
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Stone Age Columbus - transcript

NARRATOR (JACK FORTUNE): This is the story of one of the greatest voyages in human history. It was a journey which took people across thousands of miles of snow and ice through some of the most extreme weather ever seen on Earth, but these were not famous polar explorers like Scott or Shackleton and they weren't adventurers in search of conquest. These were men, women and children travelling across oceans and ice floes in search of a better life and this is more than just an epic journey. It is threatening to rewrite one of the greatest stories of them all. For these people were travelling across the Atlantic from Europe to America and they would get there 17,000 years before Columbus, in the Stone Age. Last year archaeologist Bruce Bradley went on a mission to France to challenge one of the most widely accepted theories of early human history and here, in the back room of this small museum, he found exactly the evidence he was looking for because amid the arrowheads and needles he found something which by rights should not have been here at all, some distinctive two-sided spearheads that are at least 17,000 years old.

DR BRUCE BRADLEY (Smithsonian Institution): When I first saw this material when it was first brought out I was astounded, I was shocked, I was absolutely flabbergasted. Here is what we needed.



NARRATOR: Because of what he saw a mystery that everyone thought was solved will have to be reopened, for these spearheads say that one of the great sagas of pre-history, the tale of who were the first people to populate America, will have to be rewritten. Once upon a time we thought we knew it all. The story of who had been the first settlers in America was one of the most studied in archaeology.

DR PAUL MARTIN (University of Arizona): I think to know when people first came into the New World is important. Archaeologists have been looking for the earliest for a long time. It's been a Holy Grail for them - who was first.

NARRATOR: The answer it seemed lay with one remarkable find. In 1933 in a dried-up lake in Clovis, New Mexico archaeologists uncovered an ancient spearhead. It became known as the Clovis Point.

DR DENNIS STANFORD (Smithsonian Institution): It's a very distinctive type of artefact. As you can see here it has a flake that's been taken out of the base and there's also a, a flake on the other side removed from the base and these are called flutes and beyond that the projectile point is flaked on both sides. You see it's worked here and it's worked on this side which is what we call bifacial.

NARRATOR: And alongside the Clovis Point was one huge clue to its age. The skeleton of a mammoth which it had clearly been used to kill. When they dated the bones they found they were 11,500 years old. It made the Clovis Point the oldest human artefact ever found in America. That was just the beginning. Soon all over the country archaeologists were finding thousands of similar, beautifully crafted flints, from tiny arrowheads to much larger possible ceremonial pieces, all made in the same distinctive way. The Clovis Point soon became the icon of the first Americans.

DR MICHAEL COLLINS (University of Texas): There's Clovis in every one of the 48 states in the United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, in all kinds of environments. The Clovis Point itself, it may be the first really great American technological invention.

NARRATOR: And all these Clovis Points didn't just look the same. They all seemed to date from the same time, 11,500 years ago and then the archaeologists noticed something that transformed the Clovis story into one of the great sagas of human history. 11,500 years ago it was not just one mammoth that met a bloody end - they all did and a host of other great Stone Age beasts in America - the giant armadillo, the giant sloth, the great black bear - all were wiped out in just a few brutal years.

PAUL MARTIN: It was large animals for the most part that disappeared. It looks as though it didn't take long at all. It looks as thought it was over almost as soon as it began.

NARRATOR: And so an epic story was born. Somehow from somewhere 11,500 years ago people arrived in America for the first time. Whoever they were they were warriors and they brought with them a fearsome weapon, the Clovis Point. In just a few years they charged down the length of the continent killing all the great beasts as they went. It was a fantastic story. There was only one outstanding question: where did this intrepid band of hunters come from, who were they? When the archaeologists looked for an answer they found it in the weather of the Ancient World. 11,500 years ago was the end of the last great Ice Age. Huge swathes of the northern hemisphere still lay frozen under ice. These giant ice-sheets locked up vast quantities of water. It meant that sea-levels were far lower than they are now. Huge tracks of land were exposed meaning the continents of Asia and America were joined with a bridge of land linking Siberia and Alaska across what is now the Baring Strait. It seemed clear that this was the route the Clovis people must have taken as they undertook an intrepid journey across into a new continent 11,500 years ago, so their story entered the history books. The first Americans were the Clovis, a people from Asia, and they had stayed isolated ruling America for 11,000 years until their first fatal contact with Columbus and the people of Europe in 1492. It became an accepted fact. It was such a powerful story that for years no archaeologist bothered to look back beyond 11,500 years ago. Everyone knew there could be nothing there, so no-one dug any deeper, but one day somebody did. Jim Adovasio has spent the past 30 years excavating an ancient settlement near Pittsburgh. Layer upon layer telling the story of who lived here and when going back at least 11,000 years.

DR JIM ADOVASIO (Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute): On these surfaces that you see before us we have signs of repeated visits by Native Americans to this site. These discolorations literally represent a moment frozen in time. Just below the surface I'm standing on roughly 11,000-11,200 years ago is where the conventional Clovis first model says that the earliest material should stop basically, that there ought not to be anything beneath it, no matter how much deeper we dug.

NARRATOR: But then Adovasio did the unthinkable - he dug below the Clovis layer - and that's when the trouble started.

JIM ADOVASIO: The artefacts simply continued and we recovered blades and blade cores like this all the way down to 16,000BC.

NARRATOR: If Adovasio was right then someone had been in America thousands of years before Clovis. It was an astonishing revelation. In fact it was too astonishing. When Adovasio published his findings he was simply dismissed out of hand.

JIM ADOVASIO: The majority of the archaeological community was acutely sceptical and they invented all kinds of reasons why these dates couldn't possibly be right. People have invested in the Clovis first position for more than 70 years. For a lot of people they think that this is not only a repudiation of a well accepted dogma, it's a repudiation of themselves.

NARRATOR: And so it was for other scientists. Anyone who dug back beyond 11,500 years ago had to be either mad or worse.

MICHAEL COLLINS: The best way in the world to get beaten up professionally is to claim you have a pre-Clovis site.

DENNIS STANFORD: When you dig deeper than Clovis a lot of people do not report it because they're worried about the reaction of their colleagues.

MICHAEL COLLINS: And then accused of planting artefacts. People will reject radiocarbon dates if they're older than 11,500 years ago just simply because there's not supposed to be any people here at those times and it just goes on and on and on.

NARRATOR: And so it could have stayed. The Clovis theory remained dominant with just a few awkward dissenters, but then something happened which opened up the whole mystery once more. Douglas Wallace is not an archaeologist, but nonetheless he is trying to write a complete history of the world. It's just that his history is based on the science of genetics. Stored at temperatures below minus 250°C he has samples of DNA from every part of the world, a complete record of who we all are and where we came from.

DR DOUGLAS WALLACE (Emory University): We can get insight into our history by looking at modern DNA samples. If and when we need a sample from a population in Africa or a population in Asia we can then go to that tube, pull that tube out, resurrect those cells, amplify them, isolate their DNA and ask yet a new question.

NARRATOR: Wallace was particularly interested in a type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA. As humans reproduce mitochondrial DNA is passed along the female line from mother to daughter. The only change that takes place is when there are mistakes in copying as the cells reproduce. The mistakes are called mutations and they take place with a clock-like regularity. By comparing the number of mutations in his samples from around the globe Wallace could trace not only the route our ancestors followed as they migrated across the planet, but also when they did it.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: So what we've been able to do using genetic variation and comparing the genetic variation of aboriginal populations from all the major continents of the world we've literally been able to reconstruct the history of migration.

NARRATOR: Sp the DNA should tell Wallace not just where the first American came from, but even when they made the journey. When he looked at his samples he found that genetically speaking every Native American's DNA was made up of a combination of four groups which he called A, B, C and D. They all came from Siberia and north-eastern Asia. So far this discovery was consistent with the Clovis theory, but then came the revelation. When he worked out the dates he realised there were several waves of migration and the earliest group had come over nearly 10,000 years before the Clovis, some 20,000 years ago. Immediately Wallace thought he had to be wrong. He repeated his work. So did other labs. The results were absolutely clear.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: All of the papers that had been published have come to a very similar conclusion: that the first migration was in the order of 20,000-30,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: There was now no doubt. The epic Clovis theory had to be wrong. The great quest to uncover the story of the early settlement of America had to start all over again. Archaeologists decided to go back to basics and none more so than Dennis Stanford from the Smithsonian Institute. He started with what was still the only real clue: the Clovis Point itself. He decided to look for spear points along the route from Asia to America trying to see if he could trace the people who had brought the Clovis Point to the Americas, but as he worked back through Alaska and then Siberia the trail went dead. The only tools he found were quite different.

DENNIS STANFORD: After looking at the collections we were disappointed that we didn't find what we thought we would find and I was surprised to find that the technologies were so much different.

NARRATOR: In Siberia he found Asian tools that bore no relation to Clovis Points at all. Most were made from lots of small flints called micro- blades embedded in a bone handle.

DENNIS STANFORD: Microblade technology is striking a long thin flake from the core and then making a projectile point or a knife blade out of bone and then cutting a slot in it and then putting the microblade in the slot and that's a totally different philosophy entirely than using the bifacial projectile point, as you can see here, it's just a total different mindset.

NARRATOR: There was now a real puzzle. The DNA said the earliest Americans could only have come from Asia, yet the Clovis Points seemed to have come from somewhere else. The man who set out to solve this paradox was archaeologist Bruce Bradley. Bradley has a skill that allows him to see things in stone tools that others cannot. He's a flint knapper, an expert at crafting flint objects.

BRUCE BRADLEY: So what I'm doing here is I'm choosing to be Clovis, in other words I'm choosing a Clovis approach to this piece of stone now. I'm going to grind it a little bit, strengthen it.

NARRATOR: If he could work out how the Points had been made it might be a clue to who the people were who had brought them to America.

BRUCE BRADLEY: Every piece that we find, if you know how to read it, can tell you the story of the technology from which it comes.

NARRATOR: What Bradley found was that the Clovis Points didn't just look distinctive, they had also been made in a very distinctive way.

BRUCE BRADLEY: You can see how this, starting from this side went and took off this whole other side. This is what we call an overshot outré passé flake, a very intentional process. Now I've set up to do, go this way.

NARRATOR: The result of this process is that the flint flakes off in large, useable chunks. Such flakes have been found wherever you find Clovis Points.

BRUCE BRADLEY: Not only do I have a spear point, but with this technology I have a large number of big, useable flakes that are going to be very good for making other kinds of tools and so every single flake has that little story to tell.

NARRATOR: Bradley was certain that the big flakes had to be a clue. Whoever had made the Clovis Point had used a technique quite different to that used in Asia, so where had they come from and then he remembered a textbook he had seen when he was a student. It showed pictures of ancient spearheads made 20,000 years ago, long before Clovis, by a people called the Solutreans, but their points looked very like Clovis Points. The trouble was that the Solutreans came from France.

BRUCE BRADLEY: Even then I was thinking this can't be right, something's going on.

NARRATOR: Nevertheless, the idea began to form in his mind. No matter what the textbooks of the DNA might say, perhaps some of the earliest Americans were not Asian, but European.

BRUCE BRADLEY: It was sacrilege to even mention the possibility, you know, it, it certainly wasn't part of the scientific process at that point in time. There was no possibility, forget it, don't even think about it.

NARRATOR: The heresy was that it was a challenge to the identity of Native Americans. They believed they were an Asian people with no European blood at all. It had long been a crucial part of their culture.

DR LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS (University of New Mexico): Before we run around suggesting that the Native Americans of Asian origin are not the original peoplers of the Americas, we should think long and hard about what the consequences of saying those things might be. There are historical reasons for that.

DR JOALLYN ARCHAMBAULT (American Indian Programme, Smithsonian Institution): Some Indian people will undoubtedly find it upsetting. The thought that some of our ancestors might come from Europe, the very peoples who conquered us and took away our land and colonised us, will not be a comfortable thought with many Indian people and I really can't blame them.

NARRATOR: Despite the controversy Bradley was stirring up, he decided to pursue his idea. He went to south-western France where the Solutreans had lived 17,000 years earlier. In his mind was one simple question: could they possibly have been amongst the first Americans? In France one thing became abundantly clear. The Solutreans were a remarkable people.

BRUCE BRADLEY: Of all the Stone Age cultures that we've studied, the Solutrean people continually come out as being the most innovative, the most adaptive and probably the most inventive. We have evidence that they invented the heat treatment of flint to make it better to flake. I mean they invented all kinds of things like the eyed needle and the, the list goes on and on and on.

NARRATOR: Bradley's research took him to the local museum in the town of Les Eyzies. What he saw were displays of hundreds of what looked very like Clovis Points.

BRUCE BRADLEY: I see this stuff and I just, it's, I don't know, it's so exciting. The similarity is just, it's mind-boggling.

NARRATOR: But the close similarity of the spearheads was not enough.

BRUCE BRADLEY: What we're seeing here is only the finished objects, only the things that museum people thought were really good for display. It doesn't always show you how things were made.

NARRATOR: To establish a link between the Solutreans and the earliest Americans he needed to find out if they shared the same technology. Had the Solutreans used the same big flake method to make those spearheads?

BRUCE BRADLEY: So what we do is we go back to the collections of the broken materials which is probably 99% of what there is here and in that we're seeing the various ways that the Solutrean were making the things, not just the finished objects and so it's the pieces that are hidden away that are going to tell us the most.

NARRATOR: And there in the drawers he found what he needed, clear signs that the Solutreans really had made their spearheads just like the early Americans.

BRUCE BRADLEY: The thing that I first noticed when I looked in this drawer specifically was a few pieces right on the very top - this is a good example here - that shows a kind of flaking that, where the flake is struck from one side and went across the surface removed some of the other side and these pieces show it over and over and over again. I mean just about any piece you pick up shows this very special technique. This is the technique we see uniquely in Clovis and when I saw so much of it just sitting there I just knew there had to be some kind of a connection. There's nothing in here specifically that makes them Solutrean except that we're in France and they came from here.

NARRATOR: To Bradley it was the first proof of a direct link between the people of America and Europe, but critics pointed to one problem in particular. The Solutreans had lived 17,000 years ago and the Clovis Point had apparently not arrived in America until 11,500 years ago. Where had the Solutreans been in the intervening five thousand years? It was a question that even troubled Bradley's colleagues.

DENNIS STANFORD: I was going through the old arguments, yeah, well Solutreans, five thousand years older than Clovis and you've got the Atlantic Ocean out there, so I wasn't convinced that we really ought to push forward on it.

BRUCE BRADLEY: I remember it a little bit differently. You said are you out of your mind?

NARRATOR: Bradley needed to find something to bridge the 5,000 year gap between the Solutreans and the Clovis and then from a site called Cactus Hill in Virginia a wonder: a Solutrean-style point and it dated from far earlier than the Clovis.

DENNIS STANFORD: And here we have a projectile point from a feature that dates right at 15,900 years or 16,000 years ago which is clearly right in the middle between Clovis and Solutrean and what's really exciting about it is that the technology here is very similar to Solutrean. In fact it's closer to Solutrean than Clovis where you can see that it's in a progression between Solutrean and Clovis so you have Solutrean, Cactus Hill and Clovis.

NARRATOR: The evidence of the points was that there was no 5,000 year gap. The Solutreans hadn't disappeared. They seemed somehow to have gone from France to America some 16,000 years ago, but it was still far from proof. Critics pointed out a massive problem, one that was 5,000 kilometres wide: the Atlantic Ocean. How, they asked, could a Stone Age people have made a journey that was thought to be beyond mankind until thousands of years later? The fact was the Solutreans lived in south-west France. Between their settlements here on the coast and America lay one of the biggest expanses of water in the world and there was something that made the journey far more formidable then: the Ice Age.

BRUCE BRADLEY: The environment would have been pretty much a frozen environment similar to what we see in the Arctic today and the ice was the furthest south that it, that it ever got. The environment would have been almost diametrically opposed to what we see here today. We wouldn't see people lounging on the beach.

NARRATOR: At the time of the Solutreans ice-sheets stretched down from the Arctic obliterating life as far south as southern France. The weather, even in south-western France, would have dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. The Atlantic would have been thick with icebergs and over-run with blizzards. It is difficult to conceive of a journey to America through this.

LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS: There are 5,000 kilometres of open North Atlantic Ice Age conditions to be crossed. There are icebergs floating around in the Bay of Biscay and it's a polar desert.

NARRATOR: The problem confronting Bradley and Stanford was to show how the Solutreans could have survived these extraordinarily harsh conditions. Could this Stone Age people have used their technology to take them across an ocean? How would they have travelled, kept warm and found food? There was one place on Earth where Stanford hoped he could find out, from the one people on Earth who still live in conditions like those endured by the Solutreans: the Eskimos. Stanford flew to Alaska, to the small town of Barrow. Barrow stands on the edge of the continent at the northern most tip of the United States. Here people have to endure temperatures that reach below -35°C in the winter. Nowadays they live a thoroughly modern existence, with supermarkets, four-wheeled drives and snowmobiles, but Stanford hoped that ancient Eskimo techniques might demonstrate how much the Solutreans could have achieved with their inventions thousands of years ago.

DENNIS STANFORD: I'd like to show you some old needles. This needle is 20…

ESKIMO WOMAN: Needle. (Yeah) Oh.

DENNIS: 20…

WOMAN: Eskimo needle.

DENNIS: No, 20,000 years old.

WOMAN: Ah that 20,000…

NARRATOR: The Solutrean needle was almost identical to Eskimo ones, made of bone and used until recently. The Eskimos used these needles to fashion warm, waterproof clothing out of fur.

ESKIMO WOMAN: Eskimo mukluks. This way and this way and this way and this, that way.

DENNIS STANFORD: To make a waterproof seam.

WOMAN: They use… Yeah, waterproof.

DENNIS: Right.

NARRATOR: The Eskimos used caribou skin and sinew to make their clothing. The Solutreans could have hunted the same animals and they would have had exactly the same function. That needle would have been their passport to survival in the Ice Age landscape. It would have allowed them to keep warm and dry. Even so, their survival was far from certain in this polar desert. What would they have eaten on a voyage which would have taken months? Again the Eskimo has provided the answer. There is all the food anyone could want - in the sea.

RONALD BROWER (Inupiat Heritage Centre, Barrow): The sea has been our garden. We don't have any growth, growing things. There's nothing growing up here, so we depend on the sea for our livelihood and most of our hunting is based on sea mammal hunting. We have the great whales, polar bears, walrus, seals and fish and this is a good time for us to be going out to do some crabbing, for example.

NARRATOR: What Stanford realised was that the Solutreans could have done exactly the same. They had all the tools they needed to hunt at sea, from spears to bows and arrows. Above all they had the crucial Clovis Point.

DENNIS STANFORD: The projectile points that we found that are Solutrean in age are almost identical to the in blades that Eskimos use on their seal hunting harpoons and the Clovis Point makes a wonderful harpoon point. The technology's there, the technology is definitely there.

NARRATOR: But then came the critical question: how would they actually have travelled, could they have made boats capable of surviving journeys across thousands of miles of icy water? It would be easy to assume that Eskimos today would rely on the most modern craft when going out to sea, but in fact this isn't the case.

RONALD BROWER: You need something resilient here and these advanced technological materials do not work well in the Arctic. They freeze, they break. Unbreakable plastic breaks apart.

NARRATOR: Instead Eskimos still build their whaling boats with sealskin, wood and caribou sinew. The frames are sealed with oil applied directly from seal blubber. These are exactly the type of materials that would have been available to the Solutreans.

DENNIS STANFORD: People have been using this type of craft for at least 10,000 years that we know of and probably 20,000. The flexibility of this type of, of boat is, is really amazing and it's specially built for Arctic waters.

NARRATOR: 17,000 years ago the Solutreans had all the materials and the skills they needed to build Eskimo-style boats and what Stanford discovered is that the flimsiness of these open boats is deceptive. Once launched into the water these craft are capable of making extremely long journeys through the ice.

DENNIS STANFORD: Boats like these can, could have made the journey that we're hypothesising for Solutrean people quite well. In fact I was noticing on the distance signs here in the middle of town they say it's about 1500 miles to Greenland and we know that prehistorically Eskimo peoples moved that distance from here to there several times.

NARRATOR: The way Eskimos travel is to work along the edge of the ice hopping from ice floe to ice floe. 17,000 years ago the northern Atlantic, as far south as south-west France, would have been filled with pack ice and the Solutreans would have been able to travel in the same way.

DENNIS STANFORD: Well it certainly is exactly the way I think the Solutrean guys were dealing with the ice edge 'cos you can get in and off of the ice real rapidly and, and if the weather gets a little, little nasty then you just pull up off the, out of the water and onto the ice. Operating along the edge of the ice like this you could keep hitting the water all summer.

NARRATOR: Stanford and Bradley felt the Eskimos had greatly strengthened their case. The Solutreans had everything they needed to make a journey like this and to the Eskimos the proposed feat of these Stone Age people would not be at all out of the ordinary.

RONALD BROWER: There's nothing that would have prevented other people from crossing the Atlantic into the Americas 17,000 years ago. It, it would be a perfectly normal situation from my perspective.

BRUCE BRADLEY: Why not a journey like this? I mean I'd turn the question around. It's not could they have done it, is how could they not have done it?

NARRATOR: But however convinced Stanford and Bradley were that the Solutreans were capable of this epic voyage their critics would need something stronger and then, completely by chance, a remarkable piece of new evidence emerged. Back in America, Douglas Wallace was continuing his mammoth task of writing the history books according to the evidence of DNA. So far his work showed that the Native Americans had four distinctive types of mitochondrial DNA - A, B, C and D - all of them from Asia. Then one day a set of samples from a north-eastern Native American tribe called the Ojibwa arrived on his desk.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: When we studied the mitochondrial DNA of the Ojibwa we found, as we had anticipated, the four primary lineages - A, B, C and D - but there was about a quarter of the mitochondrial DNAs that was not A, B, C and D.

NARRATOR: There was a mysterious fifth source of DNA. He called it X, and X was very strange. It was of European origin. At first he thought it must have got there some time in the last few hundred years, after Columbus.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: When we got that result we naturally assumed that perhaps there had been European recent mixture with the Ojibwa tribe and that some European women had married into the Ojibwa tribe and contributed their mitochondrial DNAs.

NARRATOR: But he was wrong. When the dates of X came back it was dated thousands of years earlier, some 15,000 years in fact, the time of the Solutreans.

DOUGLAS WALLACE Well what it says is that a mitochondrial lineage that is predominantly found in Europe somehow got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas 14,000-15,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: It seemed there could now be no doubt. Some of the earliest Americans were really from Europe. The DNA proved it and so it is now possible to tell a quite different story about the first settlement of America and one which makes sense of all the evidence. The Ice Age led not to one, but a whole host of migrations to America as people fled the frozen wastes in search of something better and one of these groups, perhaps the most important of all, was an extraordinary people from Europe.

BRUCE BRADLEY: For me the, the most important aspect of our theory about people leaving south-western Europe and eventually ending up in North America is that I, I think it takes into consideration the abilities of people to adapt to new environments, to embrace new places and to ignore the, this possibility ignores the humanity of, of people 20,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: It was a journey that would have seen them hopping from ice floe to ice floe, spearing food out at sea, huddling together to keep out the fierce cold. Eventually they would have arrived at the rich fishing grounds at the edge of a new continent. There some of the Solutreans settled and helped build an enduing culture that spread across the continent and transformed the landscape of America. Though controversial, this discovery may not be so upsetting to Native Americans after all.

JOALLYN ARCHAMBAULT: I think the value of this research is that it shows that we are truly all one species and that our ancestors tends of thousands of years ago were very much like us and they had new ideas and that they did crazy things in small boats crossing big bodies of water to go somewhere else. I mean I think that's marvellously creative and courageous.

NARRATOR: As humanity moved inexorably across the planet this great voyage of the Solutreans to settle a new world has emerged as one of the last great colonising efforts of our species.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon...bustrans.shtml
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #42
Alex Linder
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To Stanford, the Clovis tool technology that creates a leaf-shaped point appears derived from the European Solutrean culture, which featured laurel or willow-shaped spear points developed thousands of years earlier in Spain. He discounts the thick-bodied style of northeast Asian points as the progenitor of Clovis' slender points.

Stanford notes growing evidence that several sites on the East Coast, including the Cactus Hill site, and others in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Florida pre-date the Clovis time period.

Pre-Clovis culture represents a transition between Solutrean and Clovis cultures, according to Stanford. Not only do the pre-Clovis sites fill the time gap, but they are conveniently located near the Atlantic coast of Europe and North America, he noted.

The Solutrean people lived about 16,000 to 22,000 years ago, during the height of European glaciation. They lived in protected coves in southwestern France and coastal Spain and Portugal that they left in the fall and winter.

Stanford says Solutrean cave art in northern Spain appears to depict speared seals, although other scientists disagree.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1630309/posts
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #43
N.M. Valdez
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
That's not the only site that has found pre-Clovis items.
Yes. I'm quite aware that there are pre-Clovis artifacts in America. After all, "Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
None of the found items tracks with anything from Asia, but the Clovis stuff does look very much like items found in Europe.
You know, it just kind of doesn't.

Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis 'Connection'

Quote:
The archaeological crux of Bradley and Stanford’s (2004) argument is the ‘amazingly similar’ artifact technologies, which are said to be alike ‘down to minute details of typology and manufacture technology’ between Clovis and Solutrean (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 465). We will leave aside for the moment the fact that, given the temporal gap involved (Fig. 1A), attention ought to be on similarities between Solutrean and pre- Clovis, not Solutrean and Clovis. Bradley and Stanford admit this (2004: 462) but subsequently largely ignore the point.

Like others before them (such as Hibben (1941) and Greenman (1963), in comparing the so-called Sandia points with Solutrean shouldered points), Bradley and Stanford focus particularly on apparent similarities between Clovis and Solutrean lithic technologies in blade and projectile production and typology. Some of their sweeping claims, such as ‘Solutrean blade technology is more like Clovis than it is like any other European blade core technology used either before or after Solutrean’ (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 466) and ‘only these two groups consistently and purposefully used the overshot technique’ (Stanford and Bradley 2002: 261; Bradley and Stanford 2004: 465), are subjective assertions that are empirically unsubstantiated.

In regard to overshot flaking, even a cursory examination of illustrations of foliate pieces from Middle and early Upper Paleolithic contexts (i.e. long before 20 kya) in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from Aterian ones in north-west Africa and Middle Stone Age ones from Central and Southern Africa (e.g. Lupemban, Stillbay), suggests that overshot invasive flaking was not exclusive to Solutrean or Clovis. Moreover, the ubiquity of overshot flaking in Clovis is hardly demonstrated. Indeed, this technological feature occurs only rarely in fluted points in eastern North America (Meltzer 1988), and is most characteristic of the more ‘classic’ Clovis forms from the desert south west and the Southern High Plains (e.g. Bradley 1993). Even there, however, it does not occur in high frequency. In a large sample (4500 specimens) of Clovis points from Texas (Meltzer and Bever 1995; Bever and Meltzer unpublished data), of which 208 can be examined for the presence/absence of overshot flaking, only *12 per cent display that technique. Although edge trimming may have removed traces of it in some cases, its frequency is not likely to be significantly higher. The bottom line: not all Clovis technology involves overshot flaking; not all overshot flaking is Clovis or Solutrean. 511

In regard to blades, it is unclear from Bradley and Stanford’s description what is supposedly so specific about Solutrean blade technology (as if there were only one such variant) as to make ‘it’ identical to Clovis blade technology. Moreover, it must be noted that the frequency of large blades and large blade cores in Clovis is highly spotty and hardly ‘typical’ (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 461). Large blades occur in assemblages in the south central United States, e.g. Aubrey and Gault sites (Texas), Carson-Conn-Short (Tennessee), but are extremely rare – if not altogether absent – in assemblages from the rest of the continent, including eastern North America – as Stanford (1991) and others rightly note (e.g. Collins 1999; Collins and Lohse 2004).

Ironically, in the only region where concave base points of Solutrean age purportedly most like Clovis points are common (according to Bradley and Stanford 2004: 466), the eastern half of Asturias and the western half of Cantabria in northern Spain, large blades are in fact very rare due to raw material constraints. In this region, good-quality flints occur only as small nodules, so that production of the uni- and bi-facial points is based primarily on the use of quartzites and poorer quality cherts (Straus 1977, 1980, 1983, 1991a, 1996; Straus et al. 1986).

Bradley and Stanford (2004: 463) make much of the fact that Clovis lacks microblades used in composite (‘inset’) weapons, while early Siberian and Alaskan techno-complexes do have microblades. This is evidence, they argue, against a north-east Asian origin for Clovis. Yet, the matter is much more complicated than they portray. Small blades have been recovered from the Gault Clovis site, the Shoop (Pennsylvania) fluted point site and the pre-Clovis age sites of Cactus Hill (Virginia) and Meadowcroft (Pennsylvania) (Adovasio personal communication 2003; Adovasio and Pedler 2004; Collins and Lohse 2004; McAvoy and McAvoy 1997). Indeed, it was based in part on those forms that Shoop’s original investigator envisioned a historical/technological connection to north-east Asia (Witthoft 1952). Yet, these small blades are otherwise rare in Clovis and Clovis-like assemblages.

Moreover, the Solutrean side of this equation is not as Bradley and Stanford envision either. Solutrean assemblages from modern-quality (i.e. water-screened) excavations often contain large numbers of backed bladelets. For example, in some of the Solutrean levels at La Riera Cave (Asturias, Spain) backed bladelets make up between 10 and 24 per cent and even 71 per cent of retouched artifact assemblages normally totaling 100–200 pieces (Straus and Clark 1986). And the same is true for Solutrean assemblages from Amalda and Aitzbitarte IV in the coastal Basque Country, Cuevas Chufı´n and Morı´n in Cantabria, as well as Ambrosio and Parpallo´ caves in Mediterranean Spain (Straus 1993), Le Malpas (Montet-White 1973) and Combe Saunie´re rockshelters in Dordogne (Geneste and Plisson 1986), among others.

Of course, the appearance of small blades is hardly necessary evidence of a historical relationship (e.g. Elston and Brantingham 2002), as they appear in the prehistoric record all over the world at different times.

As for bifaces, Bradley and Stanford report that unifacially flaked points comprise just under half of the Solutrean concave base points (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 466). In contrast, unifacially flaked points are completely absent from the large sample of Texas Clovis points (Meltzer and Bever 1995; Bever and Meltzer unpublished data) and rare virtually everywhere else across North America. Those few specimens that do occur 512 Lawrence Guy Straus, David J. Meltzer and Ted Goebel appear to have been hastily made expedient forms. The almost-universal bifacial nature of Clovis points highlights an obvious technological difference in primary reduction between them and Solutrean forms.

Moreover, Clovis points are almost always fluted on both faces (Collins and Lohse 2004); again, to give a specific example, 92 per cent of 421 Texas Clovis points for which data are available are fluted on both faces. Solutrean points, of course, are not fluted. Bradley and Stanford (2004: 461) dismiss fluting in Clovis as nothing ‘special’, merely part of the thinning process; this is a curious claim given the ubiquity of this feature in Clovis, and its nearly universal absence in all other North American lithic assemblages, save those of Folsom groups who immediately followed. But perhaps they advanced this line anticipating the problem posed by the absence of fluting in Solutrean points and, more critically, in pre-Clovis assemblages.

Yet, oddly, they still cite ‘fluted bifaces’ occurring in Solutrean as supporting evidence of a historical connection (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 466). However, the pair of stubby, convex-base foliates with possibly accidental basal flake removals from Laugerie-Haute in Dordogne, France, published by Smith (1963), are no more relevant than the isolated Siberian finds criticized by Bradley and Stanford (2004: 467–8).

Concave base foliate points are certainly not limited to these two ‘cultures’ (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 466), there being a number of industries in Eastern Europe that have a variety of such artifact forms, including the 30 kya Streletskayan of Russia, studied by Bradley (Bradley et al. 1995: Figs. 4,5) and others – some Middle and others Upper Paleolithic (e.g. Kolosov 1990; Monigal 2004; Matioukhine 1990). Yet, it would be an even greater stretch to argue that Clovis (or the Asturian Solutrean, for that matter) ‘descended’ from the Russian Middle Paleolithic or Crimean early Upper Paleolithic.

And where in Clovis or ‘pre-Clovis’ for that matter are the stemmed points and corner notched points of the Iberian Solutrean, which are frequent not only in Mediterranean Spain, but also in Portugal – where the Solutrean ‘culture’ is at its ‘closest’ to the US East Coast (a mere 5600 km)? Further still, where are the shouldered points, of which there are many types in the French, Spanish and Portuguese Solutrean, none of which look like the so-called Sandia points?

Beyond these differences in blades and bifaces, the highly diverse Solutrean lithic assemblages include true burins (i.e. with lateral spalls removed by burination), often between 10 and 15 per cent in modern-quality collections from Cantabrian Spain (e.g. La Riera, Morı´n, Chufı´n, Amalda), sometimes including microlithic Noailles truncation burins. Nothing like these is found in Clovis assemblages (Stanford 1991).

While Clovis is well known for blade and/or biface caches (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 462), those caches number only around two dozen (Collins 1999; Meltzer 2002), and almost all of them are restricted to western North America. Moreover, the only Solutrean caches are at Montaut in south-west France and (possibly) Le Volgu in eastern France, the latter with at least fourteen very unusually large bifaces (Smith 1966: 300–2). (Interestingly, stemmed and leaf-points very similar to those of the Solutrean recur much later in the prehistory of Western Europe – in the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic, a temporal gap of some 12,000 years – but no one suggests that they were ‘related’ to the Solutrean.)

Finally, although it is certainly true that both Solutrean and Clovis knappers often ‘made a special effort to obtain exotic raw materials for the manufacture of bifaces’ Ice Age Atlantis? 513 (Bradley and Stanford 2004: 467), that is certainly not universally true. Whether the stone in an assemblage is exotic or not depended upon the scale of the settlement system; many Late Glacial-age assemblages in eastern North America are dominated by locally available lithic raw material (Meltzer 1988, 1993). It is true the material is usually of high quality, but then the same can be said of many mobile hunter-gatherers who had access to highquality stone and who needed reliable and maintainable tool kits (Bamforth and Bleed 1997; Goodyear 1979; Kelly 1988). In any case it also must be emphasized, as Bradley and Stanford (2004: 462, 465) admit, that the stone used in Clovis assemblages was rarely heat treated, while such was often practiced in Solutrean technology.
The physical differences between Solutrean and Clovis points, as well as the fact that approximately similar tools have been found at many other locations in the world due to the straightforward nature of their design, are not the only problems with the Solutrean hypothesis, obviously. Additional counter-evidence comes in other forms.

The Solutrean Atlantic Hypothesis: A View from the Ocean: "One current hypothesis for the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas invokes a dispersal by European hunter-gatherers along a biologically productive 'corridor' situated on the edge of the sea-ice that filled the Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). In this paper, we assert that critical paleoceanographic data underpinning this hypothesis has not yet been examined in sufficient detail. To this end, we present data which show that the corridor may not have existed, and that, if it did, its suitability as a migration route is highly questionable. In addition to demonstrating that the hypothesized migration was unlikely, this highlights the importance of integrating paleoceanographic and archaeological data in studies of paleo-coastal societies."

Even so, none of that quite has the weight of, "we support a model in which all mtDNA haplogroups were present in this expansion, thus refuting multiple migration scenarios such as the Solutrean hypothesis."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
I notice how quick the 'experts' are to rebut the pro-White thesis, since it has actual evidence behind it, whereas their asian theory has no evidence.
The "Asian theory" has no evidence...except radiocarbon dating and a vast literature of ancestral genetic research that refutes the "Solutrean hypothesis," which was ever only advocated by two researchers to begin with, as far as I can tell.
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I don't know what the truth is, and have said as much.
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #44
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DOUGLAS WALLACE: When we studied the mitochondrial DNA of the Ojibwa we found, as we had anticipated, the four primary lineages - A, B, C and D - but there was about a quarter of the mitochondrial DNAs that was not A, B, C and D.

NARRATOR: There was a mysterious fifth source of DNA. He called it X, and X was very strange. It was of European origin. At first he thought it must have got there some time in the last few hundred years, after Columbus.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: When we got that result we naturally assumed that perhaps there had been European recent mixture with the Ojibwa tribe and that some European women had married into the Ojibwa tribe and contributed their mitochondrial DNAs.

NARRATOR: But he was wrong. When the dates of X came back it was dated thousands of years earlier, some 15,000 years in fact, the time of the Solutreans.

DOUGLAS WALLACE Well what it says is that a mitochondrial lineage that is predominantly found in Europe somehow got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas 14,000-15,000 years ago.
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #45
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Lewis and Clark first recorded the Madan's of the Upper MO. River on their journey to the Pacific.

It was later in 1839 that George Catlin's "Letters And Note's on N.A. Indian's" was printed. If I remembered the dates correctly.

George Catlin with self made brushes and colors painted the Madan's who first meet Lewis and Clark's expedition and they had pencil drawn the Mandan's as they were astonded by finding them. Two thirds of Tribe were White, and it was a Mystery to all who encountered. Disease and warring tribes wiped them out. The Madan's from Conduct to the Way their housing and burials were down was not that of other Western Tribes.
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Last edited by America First; May 21st, 2011 at 11:52 PM. Reason: 1839, correctec 1939
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #46
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by N.M. Valdez View Post
Yes. I'm quite aware that there are pre-Clovis artifacts in America. After all, "Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas."
Which proves nothing, it's merely a claim they claim is supported by some evidence. Big deal. No one's disputing there are injuns in America today who at some point in the past came from Asia, and that's all they've proved.

Quote:
You know, it just kind of doesn't.
Yeah, actually, it kinda does.

The irony here is you have more faith in the white man's research than a christ crank in Jesus.

Anywhere "knowledge" is merely a matter of opinion, published reports will be little more than leftist agitprop, since the universities are long since flushed of honest men, and given over almost entirely to marxist, feminists and the like - all of them willfully ideologically anti-White. Thus, their research cannot be relied on.

You'll notice that none of the stuff you're now citing was needed until someone with real evidence stepped foward, and they had to start madly peddling to prop up their increasingly desperate Siberia-not-Iberia theory.

Quote:
The physical differences between Solutrean and Clovis points, as well as the fact that approximately similar tools have been found at many other locations in the world due to the straightforward nature of their design, are not the only problems with the Solutrean hypothesis, obviously. Additional counter-evidence comes in other forms.

The Solutrean Atlantic Hypothesis: A View from the Ocean: "One current hypothesis for the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas invokes a dispersal by European hunter-gatherers along a biologically productive 'corridor' situated on the edge of the sea-ice that filled the Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). In this paper, we assert that critical paleoceanographic data underpinning this hypothesis has not yet been examined in sufficient detail. To this end, we present data which show that the corridor may not have existed, and that, if it did, its suitability as a migration route is highly questionable. In addition to demonstrating that the hypothesized migration was unlikely, this highlights the importance of integrating paleoceanographic and archaeological data in studies of paleo-coastal societies."

Even so, none of that quite has the weight of, "we support a model in which all mtDNA haplogroups were present in this expansion, thus refuting multiple migration scenarios such as the Solutrean hypothesis."
They "support" a model that refutes the actual facts, lol. I'm sure they do. But the facts remain unchanged - European DNA survives in the race that murdered off the first wave of Americans. We will take that into account when deciding the ultimate fate of the skraelings.


Quote:
The "Asian theory" has no evidence...except radiocarbon dating and a vast literature of ancestral genetic research that refutes the "Solutrean hypothesis," which was ever only advocated by two researchers to begin with, as far as I can tell.
It's not a hypothesis that the earliest discovered tools in the Americas are much more like tools produced in Europe than anything produced in Asia.

What is also clear, that you resolutely fail to acknowledge because it sheds general doubt on the research you cite, is the manifest fear of these researchers to speak their true feelings not only about what they actually believe but what they have quite literally found in their diggings. Because they know the academy does not want to hear, at all, from anyone, that Asians were not the original Americans, and that Europeans were. So you can bet the real story is not what the official sources are putting out, but something most likely far more European than even the boldest professors are willing to speculate on publicly.

It's not my side that has to cover up discovery sites and give White bones to red monkeys lest the truth get out - it's yours.
 
Old May 16th, 2011 #47
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Default ". . .the idea began to form in his mind. . ."

". . .in his mind. . ."

Where else?
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #48
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Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons
By Rex Dalton May 20, 2011

SAN DIEGO — Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California chancellor, may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States. Dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old, the exceptionally preserved bones could potentially produce the oldest complete human genome from the continent.

But only if scientists aren’t barred from studying them.

Attempts to unlock the skeletons’ genetic secrets are stalled in a dispute pitting UC scientists against their own administration. Five of the scientists wrote with alarm in a letter published May 20 in the journal Science that UC administrators aren’t allowing studies on the skeletons, which were discovered on property owned by UC San Diegoin La Jolla, California.

Before samples can be extracted for genetic analysis, the scientists fear administrators will give the bones to politically powerful local Native Americans who could permanently block study.

“To give them away without study, would be like throwing the genetic crown jewels of the peopling of the Americas in the ocean,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who is among about a half dozen researchers who have unsuccessfully sought in recent months to sample or study the bones. “It would be a major loss for all, including Native Americans.”

A few studies were done years ago on the skeletons before UC withdrew access to them, but recent technological advances would allow scientists to do much more, including a digital skull calibration and possibly a full genome sequence.

“The potential loss of the La Jolla skeletons would have a profoundly negative impact on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas,” wrote the authors of the letter, led by Margaret Schoeninger, an anthropologist at UCSD.

Science letter co-author Tim White, a prominent paleoanthropologist at UC Berkeley, told Wired.com, “Administrators are doing everything they can to ignore the scientific value of the specimens. They are trying to illegally repatriate them to a lobbyist for a dozen San Diego County tribes.”

UC officials are seeking to provide the skeletons to the Kumeyaay Nation east of San Diego under a complex process guided by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). But critical scientists say NAGPRA requirements aren’t being followed properly, setting the stage for a potential legal battle over the bones.

“This is Kennewick Man II,” White said, referring to the long federal court battle in 2004 when scientists won the right to study bones found in Washington.

In a May 11 letter, Mark Yudof, president of the 10-campus UC system, authorized UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox to dispose of the bones — after clarifications are made to a report done under NAGPRA requirements, and other tribes that may be interested in the bones are consulted.

Steve Benegas, the repatriation spokesman for the Kumeyaay nation’s 12 tribes, said they are entitled to the bones and to decide about future analysis. Some Native Americans believe scientific research amounts to desecration of remains, and Benegas said he personally is against studies.

“The university has handled this poorly over the years,” he said. “We have no trust in them. They have treated the remains of our ancestors without respect.”

One of the previous analyses done years ago showed the bones have connective tissue and amino acids that are used in cell function. This means it is very likely ancient DNA can be extracted. And two skeletons buried together offers a rare opportunity to compare their genomes to see if they were related.

Genetic reports on human remains this old on the continent are very limited. In 2007, researchers published about 7 percent of the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome of bones found in a cave in southeast Alaska that are about the same age as the La Jolla skeletons. But the full genome of that individual hasn’t been sequenced and published, and DNA from bones found in wet caves can be more difficult to extract and analyze.

“The La Jolla skeletons are very special,” said Brian Kemp of Washington State University. Kemp was part of a team that retrieved samples from the Alaska bones before they were repatriated in 2007 to local tribes in an exchange seen as model of cooperation among scientists and Native Americans.

Anthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, another co-author of the Science letter, says he and others would like a similar arrangement for the La Jolla skeletons.

Scientists say UC is overlooking two key points. First, there has been no official determination the bones are actually from ancestors of modern Native Americans. Though many tribes believe their history goes further back, scientists can only confidently trace the ancestry of Native Americans to about 7,000 years ago.

Second, scientific evidence shows skeletons around this age are not always related to those who now live near burial sites. For example, last year Willerslev sequenced the genome of a 5,000-year-old man in Greenland and found he was descended from Siberian ancestors, not today’s Greenland tribes.

“It is unscientific to provide them to local people,” said Willerslev.

Since the NAGPRA rules were first issued in 1990, thousands of bones have been repatriated, almost all of which were shown to be culturally affiliated to the tribes that received them. But last year, federal officials issued new NAGPRA rules that make it easier to return bones and funerary objects that are not culturally affiliated to tribes.

Scientists and museums have been considering a legal challenge to the new rule, fearing the loss of many valuable specimens. The La Jolla skeletons could end up as the case by which that rule is challenged.

UCSD scientists determined the La Jolla skeletons are not culturally affiliated to any tribe. In fact, isotopic analysis done 30 years ago in Schoeninger’s lab (and published in 2009) showed the bones reflected a diet of seafood and marine mammals, not terrestrial foods such as nuts and wild fruits like the early Kumeyaay ate.

Schoeninger suspects UC’s efforts to give the bones to the tribe stem from a plan to renovate the chancellor’s house, and she says that Benegas, the tribe spokesman, told her as much.

UCSD officials want to rebuild the home, also known as University House, because it has become uninhabitable due to structural problems. They have received pledges totaling at least $6 million for the project from wealthy donors. Earth moving for the renovation is expected to uncover more ancient bones, which could cause costly delays if the tribes make a political or legal issue out of it.

By providing the two skeletons to the Kumeyaay, Schoeninger believes UCSD officials are hoping that refurbishing the home will go smoothly.

When asked about this theory, Benegas chuckled as he told Wired, “We wouldn’t be talking if they weren’t trying to rebuild the chancellor’s house.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...keleton-fight/
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #49
Alex Linder
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[did a search, this came back from an old stormfront page. don't know where it comes from originally.]

Spirit Cave Man: He has a long, narrow face with narrow cheekbones, a narrow chin and a protruding upper jaw. He died in his 40s. Presently the remains are in a sealed box in the possession of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nevada. The BLM has an inventory of 145 sets of remains, representing at least 154 individuals, stored there. Many sets of human remains were turned over to the Indians for repatriation. (Lahontan Valley News/Fallon Eagle Standard, August 16, 2000.) The exact location of the cave is not disclosed by local archeologists in order to protect the site. The general location given is a few miles northeast of Hidden Cave or the West Side of the Stillwater Mountain Range.

The cave was excavated first by S.M. Wheeler during the 1940 field season. (Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, spring 1997, 15, 97, 117) Spirit Cave Man was buried under another burial site in split tule and cordage matting. There were also the remains of two additional human cremations carefully placed on top of the other. Both of these bodies were burned to small fragments and dated to over 9,000 years.

1996: The University of California, Davis, in cooperation with the Nevada State Museum, asks permission to do DNA tests and carbon-14 dating tests on 41 sets of human remains held at the museum, including the Spirit Cave Man. Indian leaders oppose the request. They say invasive testing is contrary to their spiritual beliefs and traditions.

1997 (March): The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, representing all Nevada tribal governments, formally claims the Spirit Cave remains for immediate reburial under the 1990 law. (NAGPRA)

2000 (January): The Nevada State Museum withdraws requests for DNA testing and says it will no longer be the lead agency in Spirit Cave scientific studies. State officials assure the tribes that the busts of Spirit Cave Man and Wizards Beach Man won’t be publicly displayed regardless of the outcome of the dispute over the remains.

2000 (July): Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution tell the BLM the remains are very significant in the investigation of ancient North America and should not be reburied without further testing.

2000 (August 15): The BLM announces a preliminary decision that the remains cannot be linked to the Paiutes or any group of present-day people. The remains will continue to be federal property. State BLM chief Bob Abbey says no requests for invasive testing will be considered until the Department of the Interior decides on regulations for dealing with unaffiliated remains that fall under the 1990 law.

Hidden Cave Tour and Petroglyphs Park: The Hidden Cave “Interpretive Trail” visitation is organized by the BLM on the second and fourth Saturday of each month. The tour begins at the Churchill County Museum in Fallon at 9:30 a.m. The museum is located at 1050 S. Main Street. Hidden Cave was excavated in 1940, 1951 and 1979-80. When I was taking the tour we have received a number of well-done, informative flyers, our guide was a sympathetic park ranger around 30 years of age who had very detailed information on all living and dead things that has ever existed in the area but when asked about human remains found at the site he suddenly started to show the advanced symptoms of severe Alzheimer disease and refused to answer any questions. (It was like his job depended on the issue—and very likely it did.) (Map P 42, C-10)

Stillwater Marshes, Nevada: As the water levels slowly were lowered by the new weather conditions following the last ice-age the surface of marshes and lakes was slowly shrinking, compressing the relatively large human population and pressing them into competition for the best living environment. One of the last places where today there is a year-round lake in the area is Stillwater in western Nevada. In 1985 unusually high water levels washed off the topsoil around the lake and the marsh and exposed thousands of human bones, gravesites, house floors, artifacts etc. People flying over the area in small planes have noticed thousands of bones, and many home sites sticking out of the mud. In all 45 sites were located within a six-square-mile area on a chain of islands and, ismuthses. They found circular home sites, some of them as large as 800 square feet. They have found a wheel-like clay disk with a central perforation. (The Paiutes are not known to have made pottery vessels before they were exposed to white people.) A deal was made with the Indian tribes: The bones that were 50 percent below ground were left there; those that were 50 percent above were collected. A total of 4,026 human remains, belonging to about 140 humans, were collected and, after almost no examination, all was handed over to the Indians for reburial. Six individual carbon datings were performed on this incredibly rich site—meaning that the traditional Indian attitude was ruling the day at the time: “We do not want to know.“ The bones, based on the associated items they were found with, were estimated to be up to 5,000 years old. (Many 10,000-year-old skeletons originally were estimated to be around 2,000 years of age at the time they were found.)

Ann Raymond, archeologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Stillwater Management area, said: “[T]hese people were quite tall, up to six feet, while Paiutes tend to be shorter.”

The residents of this marsh area also developed food storage technics, never used by the local Indian tribes. There is no doubt this area has an unusually rich concentration of prehistoric dwelling sites, waiting to be explored. (Map 43, A-10; 44. A-1.)

Wizard Beach Man. This skull was found in the mudflats of Pyramid Lake by avocational archeologist Peter Ting during a low lake stand in 1968 and carbon-dated to 9200 years. The skull was well preserved by calcification, and is a good subject for future DNA examinations unless the federal government and the Indians can destroy this rare item, presently in a sealed box in the possession of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nevada. The Paiute Tribe is claiming it for reburial. This skull of a male in his 30s, with Europoid features was dated to be between 9,225 and 9,515 years old. (Map 34, D-3.)

(Kennewick) Man’s Best Friend Comes to the Rescue.

There were a large number of skeletal remains of dogs located in the western Nevada area. The state museum has partial remains of about 27 dogs. All remains were found in the geographic area that was inhabited by the Lovelock Culture. Crypt Cave Dog was found in the 1950s in northern Nevada, a rare complete skeleton with remains of yellow hair. Crypt Cave Dog was carefully buried in a valuable fishnet about 6,360 years ago.

(Somebody must have loved this pup; he was kept alive years after he suffered a broken rear leg.) There were five remains of dogs that were older, one of them dated 9,500 years B.C. The general assumption was that these dogs must have been bred from the local wolf population, just like Eurasian dogs were bred from the Eurasian wolf population. Nobody has paid to much attention to these poor puppies, they were not incorporated in NAGPRA and neither did they receive special civil rights protections. There was nobody to stop the scientists, who had an easy run, doing DNA tests on them left and right. The results were presented at the 5th International Ancient DNA Conference by Jennifer Leonard in a lecture: “Origin of American Dogs, a separate domestication?”

The accumulated DNA evidence clearly shows that all the dogs examined had a close relationship to the Eurasian wolf and no relationship to American wolves, meaning that they must have been brought over by the incoming waves of immigrations to the New World, by the very same tribes who have left us Kennewick Man.

Stone Age Cultural War?

Wherever we go in western Nevada we will find rocks, covered with petroglyphs. Some of the local archeologists believe these unique symbols were left behind by the mysterious early inhabitants of the area based on geographical associations. For example just a very short distance from the Hidden Cave area there are a large number of rocks covered with petroglyphs at Grimes Point. At this time there are no dependable ways to establish the approximate time of the origin of these works. However, in the January 3, 2003 issue of Science News there was an article on a possible new method to calculate the age of petroglyphs by measuring the iron and manganese component in the “desert varnish” deposited in time on the surface of the petroglyphs (using X-ray fluoroscopy).

The Pebble Mound Mystery was brought to this author’s attention first by The Nevada Archaeologist (Vol. 3, No. 1, 1981) and some printed copies of pictures from 2001. It seems that larger rocks, covered with petroglyphs, were broken into fist-sized pieces and left in the desert, most likely at their original locations. These pebble mounds can be found at many different locations, spread out in western Nevada. Some of the pebble mound sites were occupied between 11,100 and 9,000 years ago, based on the tools recovered at the sites. It did take considerable effort to break up these rocks into small pieces—the most likely reason seems to be that one population group was trying to erase even the memory of an another group—a form of Stone-Age book burning, cultural war—if you like.

(The October and the November 1997 issues of THE BARNES REVIEW have excellent articles on prehistoric rock structures apparently built by Caucasians entitled “The Mysterious Megaliths of New England.”)

Black Desert Fabric Samples: Diamond plaited fabrics, a technique unique to the Lovelock culture, have been found all over in western Nevada. All Nevada diamond plaited fabrics have been carbon-dated to over 9,000 years of age. The technic is far more sophisticated than those used by the Indians in later centuries. It involves a set of wooden stakes used as a frame on the ground, that helps the maker to create a larger, more even, denser split tule and cordage matting. The local Indian population had never used this sophisticated technique. Eugene Hattori, a resident archeologist at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, and Catherine Fowler were working to compare these mat samples to woven textiles in other parts of the world.

Willow Creek Site: Located in the Modoc National Forest, outside Susanville in northeastern California, managed by the BLM. A number of petroglyphs were found here, symbols with astronomical meanings. The site has been partially built, manipulated so the user can predict certain important celestial events very precisely. (With the help of this site the user can track the yearly cycle of the sun and the 19-year cycle of the moon.)

Browns Valley Male: a male, dated to 9,710 years ago, no relation to the Indians. Buried by the Sioux on October 2, 1999.

Buhl Woman: Found in a rock quarry in Buhl Idaho, in 1989, died in her teenage years about 12,800 years ago. No study was done before she was reburied by the Shoshone Bannock tribes in 1991. Based on photographic evidence Dr. Owsley has calculated the skull’s dimensions and concluded that she had no relation to the Indian population.

Grimes Point Child: A 10-year-old girl who died about 10,800 years ago. Presently at the Carson City Museum, claimed by the Paiute.

Minnesota Woman: From Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, 1931. Dated: 6,775 years B.C. No relation to Native Americans. DNA test was successful. The Sioux Tribe in South Dakota buried her on October 2, 1999.

The Hour Glass Cave Male: About 9,140 years old, found in the Colorado Rockies in 1988. No research was done. Reburied by the Southern Ute Tribe.

Winnemucca Lake: Dry lakebed northeast of Reno. Walter Cronberg discovered a cave high up in the hills, overlooking the dry lakebed in February of 1947. (Nevada Sunday Morning, Aug. 1, 1948) They found the caves “on the southeast fringe of mountains that circle the dry lakebed.” About 30 caves had been explored in the area. They have found “two complete skulls,” “10 or 15 thigh bones and fragments of other skulls” and “numerous artifacts.”

The caves were explored again by Dr. Richard Shutler in 1961. (Nevada State Journal, July 23, 1961) Large number of items recovered from ten different caves. (Map 34. F-5.)
“Paleo Kid.” The bones of a child, presently in the possession of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, the 10,600-year-old “Paleo Kid,” a girl nine or 10 years old with the same long skull shape as Spirit Cave man, also has a Carabelli’s cusp, a Caucasoid trait, discussed by Dr. Chatters.

On June 4, 1963, A local newspaper in western Nevada declared G.C. Rollins of Lovelock, Nev., “Mr. Treasure Hunter of 1963” for finding a “mummified man, which Columbia University has carbon-dated as being 35,000 years old.”
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #50
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[audio hard to hear: windover bog people have European DNA (notice the deliberate scare music used for background)]

The First Americans - Part 6 - DNA Of The Windover Bog People

[most of the vid segment is about weaving preservation, the DNA part starts at 6:20]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbayB...embedded#at=36

Notice the quick cut immediately after the scientist says the first person's DNA looked European. This is the film editor wanting to erase the impression. He does not want to let this remarkable statement sink in so he quickly moves the camera off the eyes of the scientist. The editor does it again when the scientist makes similar statement about the 2nd; and he does it again after the scientists says the 3rd, 4th and 5th people also looked European. Immediate, sub-1second quick cut away to prevent the fact from sinking in with the viewer. Then the narrator says the scientist's results "could be" consistent (rather than "are" consistent) with the theory that "some of the earliest people" (rather than "the first people") migrated to America from Europe...

Political correctness in the scientist. You can tell he's having internal problems simply speaking his mind, or saying the thing flat out (the first Americans came from Europe), and struggles to come up with coded language that will be less threatening to the Politically Correct, who have built an industry, tyranny and guilt complex on Whites having committed genocide against "Native Americans." So rather than speak straightforwardly, the scientist Lorenz says: "If our genetic analysis shows that these individuals really do belong to a new and previously unidentified lineage, founding lineage in the new world...it would be very big news."

The scientist = Dr. Joe Lorenz, Coriell Institute for Medical Research - does haplogroup analysis on brains of five Windover Bog People

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 23rd, 2011 at 02:57 PM.
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #52
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interview with nevada museum official re red-headed giants the Paiutes wiped out by cornering them in a cave and burning them out. Si-Te-Cah (first syllable is accented, and pronounced Sigh-teh-kuh)

 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #53
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McNallen on points anthros consider in judging whether bones are indian or not; Kennewick man, Paiutes oral tradition that they killed off the last Si-Te-Cah white men with yellow and red hair/bears, haplogroup X

 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #54
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Haplogroup X video (2010)


Indians were haplogroups A, B, C, D until in 1998 they found haplogroup X. The probably jew broad in vid says 3% of 'native americans' (sic) have it, primarily those in the upper great plains. BUT, haplogroup X can't be found in Siberia, where the forerunners of the redskins are supposed to have come from.

Haplogroup X2a found in Ojibwe, Sioux and others. Haplogroup X found in 6-8k-old remains of people in Pyrenees in Europe, Basque country.
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #55
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Haplogroup X



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_(mtDNA)

Overall haplogroup X accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East and North Africa.

Sub-group X1 is much less numerous, and restricted to North and East Africa, and also the Near East.

Sub-group X2 appears to have undergone extensive population expansion and dispersal around or soon after the last glacial maximum, about 21,000 years ago. It is more strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean Europe; and somewhat less strongly present in the rest of Europe. Particular concentrations appear in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (in Scotland) (7%) and amongst the Israeli Druze community (27%). Subclades X2a and X2g are found in North America, but are not present in native Latin Americans.[3]


This relative absence of haplogroup X2 in Asia is one of the major factors causing the current rethinking of the peopling of the Americas. However, the New World haplogroup X2a is as different from any of the Old World X2b, X2c, X2d, X2e and X2f lineages as they are from each other, indicating an early origin "likely at the very beginning of their expansion and spread from the Near East".[12]

The Solutrean Hypothesis postulates that haplogroup X reached North America with a wave of European migration about 20,000 BP by the Solutreans,[13][14] a stone-age culture in south-western France and in Spain, by boat around the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack.

Various articles by a group of researchers in Brazil (except for David Glenn Smith, of U.C. Davis) argue against the Solutrean hypothesis. In one 2008 article, in the American Journal of Human Genetics, they assert: "Our results strongly support the hypothesis that haplogroup X, together with the other four main mtDNA haplogroups, was part of the gene pool of a single Native American founding population; therefore they do not support models that propose haplogroup-independent migrations, such as the migration from Europe posed by the Solutrean hypothesis."[15]

Again in 2008 that same team of genetic scientists republished essentially the same article under the same title, making a similar point: "Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a single founding population, thereby refuting multiple-migration models." [16]


[The above comes from wikipedia, a politically correct System utility that slants evidence toward the anti-Whitest conclusion possible. Notice the Solutrean hypothesis is the last brought up, and it is shot down as soon as it is mentioned. This is what it looks like when a group is trying to cover something up while maintaining a facade of objectivity.]
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #56
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Solutrean theory

The Solutrean hypothesis proposes that stone tool technology of the Solutrean culture in prehistoric Europe may have later influenced the development of the Clovis tool-making culture in the Americas, and that peoples from Europe may have been among the earliest settlers in the Americas.[1][2] It was first proposed in 1998. Its key proponents include Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Bruce Bradley, of the University of Exeter.

In this hypothesis, peoples associated with the Solutrean culture migrated from Ice Age Europe to North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for later Clovis technology found throughout North America. 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.

Characteristics

Solutrean culture was dominant in present-day France and Spain from roughly 21,000 to 17,000 years ago. It was known for its distinctive toolmaking characterized by bifacial, percussion and pressure-flaked points. Traces of the Solutrean tool-making industry disappear almost completely from Europe around 15,000 years ago, when it was replaced by the stone tools of the Magdalenian culture.

Clovis tools are typified by a distinctive type of spear point, known as the Clovis point. Solutrean and Clovis points share common characteristics: points are thin and bifacial, and they share the intentional use of the overshot flaking technique, which quickly reduces the thickness of a biface without reducing the width.

The Clovis blade differs from the Solutrean in that some of the former have bi-facial fluting (a long depression that occurs on a point, struck from the basal end of the point; the purpose was to better fit the point onto a spear foreshaft). Clovis tool-making technology seems to appear in the archaeological record in eastern North America roughly 13,500 years ago, and similar predecessors in Asia or Alaska, if they exist, have not been discovered.

Atlantic crossing

The hypothesis proposes that Ice Age Europeans could have crossed the North Atlantic along the edge of the pack ice that extended from the Atlantic coast of France to North America during the last glacial maximum. The model envisions these people making the crossing in small watercraft, using skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people, hauling out on ice floes at night, getting fresh water by melting iceberg ice or the first-frozen parts of sea ice, getting food by catching seals and fish, and using seal blubber as heating fuel. Among other evidence backing up this hypothesis is the discovery among the Solutrean toolkit of bone needles, very similar to those traditionally used by the modern-day Inuit.[3] As well as enabling the manufacture of waterproof clothing from animal skins, the technology could, in theory, have been used to construct kayaks from the same animal skins. However, a 2008 study (see below) argues that the conditions were not favorable for such a crossing.

Transitional styles

Supporters of the hypothesis suggest that stone tools found at Cactus Hill (an early American site in Virginia) indicate a transitional style between the Clovis and Solutrean cultures. Artifacts from this site are estimated to date from 17,000 to 15,000 years ago, although some researchers dispute their definitive age. Other sites that may indicate transitional, pre-Clovis occupation include the Page-Ladson site in Florida and the Meadowcroft rockshelter in Pennsylvania.

Solutrean_hypothesis Solutrean_hypothesis
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #57
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Brown M.D., Hosseini S.H., Torroni A., Bandelt H.J., Allen J.C., Schurr T.G., Scozzari R., Cruciani F., Wallace D.C.. "mtDNA haplogroup X: An ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?" American Journal of Human Genetics, 1998 Dec;63(6): 1852-61.
Greenman, E.F. 1963. "The Upper Palaeolithic and the New World", Current Anthropology, 4: 41–66.

Hibben, Frank C., "Prehistoric Man in Europe," University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1958.

Jablonski, Nina G., "The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World," University of California Press, 2002

Reidla, Maere et al., "Origin and Diffusion of mtDNA Haplogroup X", Am J Hum Genet. 2003 November; 73(5): 1178–1190. Published online 2003 October 20.

Stanford, Dennis, and Bruce Bradley. 2002. "Ocean Trails and Prairie Paths? Thoughts About Clovis Origins." In The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, Nina G. Jablonski (ed.), pp. 255–271. San Francisco: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 27.

Stanford, Dennis, and Bruce Bradley. 2004. "The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World." World Archaeology, 36(4): 459-478.

Stanford, Dennis, and Bruce Bradley. 2006. "The Solutrean-Clovis connection: reply to Straus, Meltzer and Goebel." World Archaeology, 38(4): 704-714.

Straus, Lawrence G. 2000. "Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality". American Antiquity 65 Nr. 2: 219-226.

Strauss, Larence G et all 1990, 'The LGM in Cantabrian : Spain: the Solutrean', in Soffer and Gamble (eds.) The world at 18,000 bp: high latitudes, pp. 89–108. Unwin Hyman.
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #58
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Cactus Hill is an archaeological site in southeastern Virginia, United States. The site sits on sand dunes above the Nottoway River and lies about 45 miles south of Richmond. The site is owned by the International Paper Corporation.

The site has yielded multiple levels of early occupation. Archaic stage material is underlain by fluted stone tools associated with the Clovis culture reported dated to 10,920 BP. A lower level yields artifacts including unfluted bifacial stone tools with ages reported ranging from 15,000 to 17,000 years-old. White pine charcoal from a hearth context on this level has reported dates to 15,070 radiocarbon years BP.[1] Further charcoal deposits retrieved at the site have a reported date to as early as 19,700 years ago, although these deposits may have been made by forest fires. Cactus Hill is arguably the oldest archaeological site in North America.[2]

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 23rd, 2011 at 05:24 PM.
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #59
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Page-Ladson prehistory site

The Page-Ladson prehistory site is a deep hole in the bed of the Aucilla River (between Jefferson and Taylor Counties in the Big Bend region of Florida) that has stratified deposits of late Pleistocene and early Holocene animal bones and human artifacts reaching back to about 14,500 to 12,500 years before the present. The earliest dates for artifacts recovered from the site are between 1,000 and 1,500 years before the advent of the Clovis culture.[1]

At the height of the last ice age (the Wisconsin glaciation), the sea level was up to 100 meters lower than at present. Most of Florida is a thick limestone platform, with typical Karst topography. As limestone is porous, salt water penetrates the lower part of the Florida platform, and fresh water floats on top of the salt water. With the lowered sea level of the ice age, the fresh water table in Florida was also lowered, leaving most of Florida much drier than it is at present. The only reliable sources of fresh water at elevations that are currently above sea level were sinkholes and the deeper parts of river beds. The Page-Ladson site was one of those watering holes, located in a ravine that is now the bed of the river.

The lower part of the Aucilla River is partly underground, surfacing for short stretches and then disappearing again. The Page-Ladson site is located in one of the above ground sections, known as Half-Mile Run (although it is closer to one mile long). Other sites on the Aucilla River are also yielding paleontological and archaeological finds, all as part of a long-running Aucilla River Prehistory Project.[2]

Starting in 1959, Dick Ohmes and other scuba divers began retrieving artifacts and Pleistocene animal bones with butcher marks from the lower reaches of the Aucilla River. A team led by archaeologist James Dunbar and paleontologist S. David Webb began a survey of Half-Mile Run in 1983. A former U.S. Navy Seal, Buddy Page, showed them a site where he had found elephant bones. A 20-inch-deep (510 mm) test pit yielded elephant bones, bone tools and chips from tool making. Radiocarbon dating of organic material from the pit yielded dates from 13,000 to 11,700 years Before Present. The owners of the land surrounding Half-Mile Run, the Ladson family, granted permission to the team to access and camp along Half-Mile Run. The Site was therefore named Page-Ladson.

Excavation of the Page-Ladson site spanned the period from 1984 until 1997. As the project progressed, the team developed new methods of recording the stratigraphic placement of all material in an underwater environment.

The lowest strata in Page-Ladson is late Pleistocene. In includes mastodon, mammoth, horse and ground sloth, palaeolama bones and "straw mats" of chopped vegetation (leaves, bark and wood) of relatively uniform length. The length of the chopped vegetation is consistent with the spacing between cusps on mastodon teeth, and the "straw mats" have been interpreted as equivalent to the layers of trampled elephant dung found around water holes in Africa. Elephant steroids have been identified in the "digesta" deposits at Page-Ladson and Latvis-Simpson (a 32,000-year-old mastodon site farther south in the Aucilla). Some of the bones from this level show apparent human-made cut marks, particularly a complete mastodon tusk. Ivory spear points (often called "foreshafts") are found more frequently in the Aucilla River than everywhere else in North America combined. Samples from the "straw mat" level have yielded radiocarbon dates from 13,130 +/- 200 to 11,770 +/- 90 years Before Present. The "straw mat" level is covered by a layer of mud that did not contain any bones of extinct animals.

In 1996 an Early Archaic Bolen habitation level was found. At least three hearths were identified, and various stone points, scrapers, adzes and gouges were found, as well as antler points used to press flakes off the stone tools. Three wooden stakes were found upright in the ground, and a cypress log that had been burned on the top side and hollowed out. Radiocarbon dating yielded dates around 10,000 years Before Present. The site was well-preserved because it had been flooded by a rise in the river level within a hundred years after the site was occupied.
 
Old May 23rd, 2011 #60
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Meadowcroft Rockshelter is an archaeological site located near Avella in Washington County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, United States. The site, a rock shelter in a bluff overlooking Cross Creek (a tributary of the Ohio River), is located about 36 miles west-southwest of Pittsburgh. The site, including a museum and 18th-century village, is operated by the Heinz History Center. The artifacts from the site show the area has been continually inhabited for 16,000 years, since Paleo-Indian times. The Rockshelter was named a National Historic Landmark in 2005. It is also recognized as a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Treasure and is an official project of Save America's Treasures.

Site

The rockshelter is a natural formation beneath an overhanging cliff of Morgantown-Connellsville sandstone, which is a thick Pennsylvanian-age sandstone brown in color. Meadowcroft is in the Allegheny Plateau, northwest of the Appalachian Basin.[4]

Native Americans left the site during the American War for Independence. It was not re-discovered until many years later. The first artifacts at Meadowcroft were discovered by Albert Miller in 1955 by way of a groundhog burrow. Miller delayed reporting his findings for some time, until he contacted James M. Adovasio, now director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute. The site was excavated from 1973 until 1978 by a University of Pittsburgh archaeological team led by Adovasio through the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institiute (MAI). Radiocarbon dating of the site indicated occupancy beginning 16,000 years ago and possibly as early as 19,000 years ago. The dates are still controversial, although some archaeologists familiar with evidence from the site agree that Meadowcroft was used in the pre-Clovis era and, as such, provides evidence for very early human habitation of the Americas. In fact, if the 19,000-years-ago dating is correct, Meadowcroft Rockshelter is the oldest known site of human habitation in North America, and thus provides a unique glimpse into the lives of prehistoric hunters and gatherers.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter has yielded Woodland, Archaic, and Paleoindian remains. Paleoindians were primarily hunters of big game animals which are now extinct. In total, animal remains representing 149 species were excavated. Evidence shows that natives gathered smaller game animals as well as plants, such as corn, squash, fruits, nuts and seeds. The site at Meadowcroft rock shelter has produced Pre-Clovis remains. The remains were found as deep as 11.5 feet underground. The site also has yielded many tools, including pottery, bifaces, bifacial fragments, lamellar blades, a lanceolate projectile point, and chipping debris. Recoveries of note also include fluted points, which are a marker of the Paleoindian period. This is further evidence that supports Adovasio's findings. The Meadowcroft Rockshelter site also included remains of flint from Ohio, jasper from eastern Pennsylvania and marine shells from the Atlantic coast. These findings suggest that the people inhabiting the area were mobile and involved in long distance trade. At least one basin-shaped hearth was reused over time. Additionally, the site has yielded the largest collection of flora and fauna materials ever recovered from a location in eastern North America.[5] The arid environment found at Meadowcroft Rockshelter provided the necessary and rare conditions which permitted excellent botanical preservation. The methods of excavation used at Meadowcroft are still seen as state-of-the-art. It is viewed as one of the most carefully excavated sites in North America.

Current site

Recent renovations to the rock shelter have been made so that visitors can see some of the tools and campfires made by the first Americans thousands of years ago. The Rockshelter is recognized as a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Treasure and is an official project of Save America's Treasures.

Improvements at Meadowcroft have taken place recently, including a newly paved road which makes getting to the site easier for visitors.
 
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