20 October 2011
Old American theory is ‘speared’By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC NewsAn ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end – once and for all – a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.
The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.
This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent’s original inhabitants.
News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.
In truth, the “Clovis first” model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.
A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this – perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.
The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.
[…]
The timing of humanity’s presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.
Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) – all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.
A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role – as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.
“Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago – that’s the end. They finished them off,” said Prof Waters.
“You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time,” he finished. “But there’s nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it’s time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that.”
First things first… This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge. It remains the only viable pathway. Pushing their migration back in time a few thousand years into the Pleistocene just means that the first wave arrived before the Bølling /Allerød interstadials during the Oldest Dryas instead of during the Younger Dryas.
GISP2 ice core climate reconstruction of the Late Pleistocene through Holocene (after Alley, 2000)
The Real Clear Science link to this article was titled, “First Americans Not From Siberian Land-Bridge.” The BBC reporter seemed to draw a similar erroneous conclusion… “In truth, the ‘Clovis first’ model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.” The paper in Science is behind a pay-wall; but the abstract doesn’t seem to cast any doubt on the Bering land bridge theory. The significance of this discovery is that the Anthropocene may have begun much earlier than previously thought… At least several thousand years before mankind discovered capitalism…
Science 21 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6054 pp. 351-353
DOI: 10.1126/science.1207663•Report
Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington
Michael R. Waters1,*, Thomas W. Stafford Jr.2,5, H. Gregory McDonald3, Carl Gustafson4, Morten Rasmussen5, Enrico Cappellini5, Jesper V. Olsen6, Damian Szklarczyk6, Lars Juhl Jensen6, M. Thomas P. Gilbert5, Eske Willerslev5Abstract
The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.
A previous post of mine, Run Away!!! The Anthropocene is Coming!!!, drew some criticism about my assertion “that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction.” My comment was at least somewhat sarcastic… And yes, I do know that the human migration out of Africa began long before the Holocene, but, it is a simple fact that mastodons, stegodons and mammoths had “weathered” all of the prior Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles just fine. The only major distinction between the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and the previous glacial-interglacial transitions was the migration of humans out of Africa, across the world and the demise of most of the mega fauna that were in the path of that migration…
Mammoths, Stegodons and Mastodons loved the Pleistocene but never got acquainted with the Holocene.
While I may profusely ridicule the notion that mankind’s industrial activities over the last 200 years have given rise to a unit of geological time, distinct from the Holocene… I fully believe that mankind’s conquest of Earth since the late Pleistocene is the only thing that truly distinguishes the Holocene from previous Quaternary interglacials.
Debunk House 
October 28, 2011 at 13:06 |
Forty years ago, I’m pretty sure Dr. Hoerling would have thought that the significantly wetter winters during 1958-1970 were evidence that the magnitude and frequency of the wetting that had occurred was too great to be explained by natural variability alone.
These sort of stories always remind me of a classic episode of Jungle Jim…
October 31, 2011 at 05:22 |
We don’t know why various and sundry ancient species went extinct. We have to live with that sorrowful lack until we learn more ;>D
November 2, 2011 at 09:23 |
The megafauna of Africa and human ancestors had co-existed for at least several hundred thousand years. As humans spread out through Africa and South Asia, the megafauna had time and space to adjust to human predation. The megafauna of North America, Europe and North Asia had far less time and space (suitable habitat) to adapt to human predation.
The Clovis people did not go extinct…
November 3, 2011 at 06:17 |
The Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets were fully separated by 14.5 kya. Beringia, including large areas of Siberia and Alaska, never glaciated. And, as you pointed out, the coastal route was also intermittently open enough for island/beach hopping long before the Alberta route opened up.
On the other hand, the Atlantic coastal route did not open up before 10-12 kya.
The only pre-Clovis human DNA identified to date (Paisley Caves, Oregon) “belonged to Native Americans in haplogroups A2 and B2, haplogroups common in Siberia and east Asia.”
The highest modern concentration of Haplogroup X is found in the Druze of Lebanon. Traces of Haplogroup X in some modern American Indians, concentrated in the US Southwest, only provides evidence of an ancient connection to a rare haplotype found in Europe. It does not provide evidence of a migration from France to North America…
The Mediterranean is not analogous to the North Atlantic. The lower sea levels of the LGM exposed and expanded many islands in the Mediterranean and the climate was relatively mild. There were no ice-free land areas along the Greenland or North American Atlantic coasts north of Nova Scotia and no glacially exposed islands from Iceland to the Grand Banks at the time of the Clovis/pre-Clovis migrations and the North Atlantic climate was a bit more harsh than the Mediterranean.
As I’ve previously posted, the data don’t preclude the Solutrean hypothesis; they just don’t support it.
There is no DNA evidence indicative of an Australian aboriginal linkage.
November 3, 2011 at 11:55 |
That blog is 100% science fiction.
There is nothing mysterious about the “Chihuahuan Ignimbrites”… And the rhyolitic eruptions from which they were sourced occurred in the Mid-Tertiary…
Even if the mid-Tertiary ignimbrites of the Sierra Madre Occidental of western Mexico were caused by an extraterrestrial impact event, it would have happened ~30 million years prior to the extinction of the North American megafauna.
November 3, 2011 at 13:46 |
Pristine? Undisturbed?
November 3, 2011 at 15:53 |
What “radial curtain of pristine pyroclastic materials?”
Enough with the Erik Van Danniken stuff already… The NE striking ridge that you seem to be focusing on is Cretaceous limestone & shale. Have you ever even looked at a geologic map of the region? The stuff surrounding it is Quaternary alluvium.
More Geology vs. Mythology
There are lots of volcanic and igneous outcrops in the area… All of them of Tertiary age and most rhyolitic… None of them are even remotely associated with impact-related geology.
November 4, 2011 at 03:33 |
“The megafauna of Africa and human ancestors had co-existed for at least several hundred thousand years. As humans spread out through Africa and South Asia, the megafauna had time and space to adjust to human predation. The megafauna of North America, Europe and North Asia had far less time and space (suitable habitat) to adapt to human predation.”
That is the story line at any rate. Human ancestors were unlikely to be very effective predators nor likely abundant enough to have significant impact on prey species. One only need to examine the diets and abundance of all related extant primate species.
There is no confirming evidence that humans evolved in Africa and since H. erectus and related precursor types were well distributed over most of Africa and Eurasia prior to the advent of H sapiens, there are a number of possibilities. The genetic evidence is crap atm but it’s getting better. .
Behavioral adaptation is actually quite rapid, virtually instantly in geologic terms but anyone who has hunted or fished knows that animals respond immediately to predation. .Species can respond genetically to predation pressure in as little as 25 generations. This is not a convincing argument at all.
There is no concrete evidence that ranges of North American megafauna was any less constrained than that of any other continent that I have seen.
Fossil formation is a poor mechanism for drawing any quantitative or qualitative conclusions about populations just as many other proxies have issues in translation.
There is nothing to be gained in all this froth. We simply do not know and that is all we know. All the rest is just speculation and story-telling.
November 4, 2011 at 04:52 |
While this doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Altaian X could have arrived in Siberia later than in North America, it is far more likely that Altaian X was the source of Amerindian X.
November 4, 2011 at 09:21 |
The Altaians are in Siberia. Their X haplotype is closer to the Amerindian than the European haplotype is. The Altaians have the same five haplotypes “the Ojibwa, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the Sioux, and the Yakima, as well as the Na Dene–speaking Navajo” – No other group is such a close match. The Atlaian haplotype plots in an intermediate position between Amerindians and Europeans.
The only pre-Clovis human DNA identified in North America was found in Oregon and contains the A-D haplotypes; but lacks the X.
Haplotype X is restricted to northern Amerindian groups; not eastern. I was mistaken earlier when I said it was concentrated in the southwest… I forgot that the Navajo didn’t start out in Arizona & New Mexico. The highest Amerindian X concentration is in the Ojibwa (the Chippewa) who were first encountered by Europeans (French missionaries) near Lake Superior ca. 1640.
The Clovis and Solutrean blades share a lot of similarities; but they are not identical.
The Solutrean culture (including their blades, spear points, sewing kits & tools) pretty well vanished from the European fossil record ~15 kya. The Clovis blade is not present in the North American fossil record prior to ~13.5 kya. The pre-Clovis blade that killed the mastodon, thus spearing the Clovis first theory, was neither Clovis nor Solutrean.
Ultimately we all have the same roots.
I can’t disprove a Solutrean migration along sea ice from France to the Grand Banks and then into Nova Scotia. The DNA patterns don’t exclude that possibility. Of course I can’t disprove a migration via Egyptian parasails or Atlantean motor yachts either… /sarc 😉
Although, I can disprove Crater Hunter’s “Mexican Impact Zone” and “radial curtain of pristine pyroclastic materials.”
I don’t think so…
November 10, 2011 at 07:53 |
I was watching a documentary about the Missoula mega-floods and thought about how many Megafauna, in fact, drowned during the last ice age retreat.
Not in the rare mega-flood events, but in the fact that there so many new large rivers and lakes around as the ice was melting back.
If Mammoth herds were accustomed to fording the Mississippi River, for example to get to new grassland sources, starting about 16,000 years ago, they no longer would have made it across. Maybe it was only every 4 or 5 years that the river was too wide and the current too strong.
This river effectively split the US into two in the period from 16,000 to 9,000 years ago, running from Manitoba to the Gulf of Mexico.
The large rivers and new lakes covering all of the northern US and southern Canada, would have effectively isolated populations into small regions. Any Megafauna herds trying to ford rivers would have been wiped out every 4 or 5 years. Populations living around Lake Agassiz or Lake Ontario (which was once twice as big) might have got stuck on a large island only to find themselves innundated later.
Just another part of the picture.
Nice clickable shaded relief map which shows where all the rivers used to flow and how large the Great Lakes got to etc.
http://geology.com/shaded-relief/
November 10, 2011 at 09:33 |
Bill,
Very good point. I think the glacial outwash was probably a big factor. There’s ~30,000 feet of Pleistocene sediment in some parts of the Gulf of Mexico deepwater. That sediment largely got there as a result of glacial outwash.
While the catastrophic events, like the Missoula mega-flood, were rare… Each and every deglaciation would have been massively disruptive to megafauna habitats. Throw in the arrival of skilled human hunters and their hunting dogs during the Oldest Dryas and that habitat disruption became terminal for most of the megafauna.
March 13, 2012 at 04:46 |
What Bill Illis and Don Easterbrook said, plus…
According to the serially flawed Firestone et al., 2007, the Carolina Bays were formed by a massive bolide (air bursting chondrite meteor/asteroid), which also triggered the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial (cold period), caused the extinction of the North American megafauna and destroyed the Clovis culture.
About half-a-dozen papers over the last four years have shot down every single point of Firestone et al., 2007. The most effective was Paquay et al., 2009. Paquay could not reproduce the iridium anomalies that Firestone claimed to be associated with the onset of the Younger Dryas. Paquay also looked at the entire platinum group…
Paquay PGE Plot
Paquay noted that the presence of nanodiamonds without “a defined geochemical anomaly” is not a “robust diagnostic of an airburst event.”
Melott et al., 2010 did find a nitrate spike associated with the onset of the Younger Dryas, comparable to the one associated with the Tunguska bolide. But a bolide powerful enough to trigger the Younger Dryas would have been ~6 orders of magnitude larger than Tunguska…
Melott Nitrate Plot
Carlson, 2010 noted that the Younger Dryas nitrate increase was not unique. The previous stadial was also associated with a nitrate increase…
Carlson Nitrate Plot
So… There is no clear geochemical signature of a bolide at the Younger Dryas. While Tunguska exhibits a clear platinum group anomaly…
Tunguska PGE Plot
The Younger Dryas exhibits no evidence of a major bolide. Furthermore, Scott et al., 2010 found the carbonaceous spherules to “have morphologies and internal structures identical to fungal sclerotia (such as Sclerotium and Cenococcum).”
Tunguska was thought to have been a 50-80 m carbonaceous chondrite that exploded at an altitude of 5-10 km.
The Carolina Bays are assumed by some to be crater-like in appearance and consistent with a Tunguska-style bolide. Despite the fact that the Tunguska bolide did not cause a distinctly clear crater (although a fragment of it might have caused one).
The Barringer Crater was caused by an impacting 10-50 m nickel-iron meteor 40-50 thousand years ago. Its explosive intensity was similar to Tunguska; but it impacted the ground rather than exploding in the atmosphere. It left a big hole in the ground, filled with lechaterlierite (fused silica glass) and meteoric material…
Barringer Crater Geologic Map
Barringer Crater Cross Section
The Carolina Bays are semi circular depressions in sandy alluvial and eolian Pleistocene-aged sediments, filled with Holocene-aged mud, muck & peat. They are ubiquitous on flat, low-lying Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastal plains. They are not craters nor are they even remotely analogous to Tunguska. The Elizabethtown NC quadrangle is loaded with Carolina Bay features…
Elizabethtown Surficial Geology Map
The Carolina Bays are generally NW-SE trending semicircular swampy areas occupying shallow depressions in older sandy deposits…
Elizabethtown Surficial Geology Map Zoom
In cross section, they don’t look anything like craters…
Elizabethtown Cross Section
And they really don’t look anything at all like Barringer Crater when plotted at the same scale…
Barringer – Carolina Bay Comparison
The Carolina Bays were supposedly craters caused by a larger bolide than Tunguska… Yet they don’t have any geochemical signature, no impact mineralogy and their “craters” are smaller than the pile of dirt at the bottom of Barringer Crater.
The Carolina Bays meteor/asteroid/comet would have had to have been powerful enough to leave 100’s of thousands of small craters without leaving as much geochemical evidence as a much smaller bolide 12,000 years later… And those craters would have had to have been much more subdued than the one left by a single impacting nickel-iron meteor 40,000 years earlier. One of Paquay’s sites was Howard Bay NC (a Carolina Bay feature). It exhibited no PGE anomaly.
The robot from Lost in Space would say, “That does not compute.”
March 13, 2012 at 11:36 |
There is absolutely no evidence of “flash frozen” mammoths anywhere on Earth.
“Baby Lyuba” was even better preserved than the famous “Baby Dima” and she was not “perfectly preserved”…
Lyuba is the first and only mammoth carcass to have “well preserved” internal organs…
The fact that “airways and digestive system were clogged with” silt is a pretty clear indication that she drowned in a flash flood, sank in a bog or was killed by a mudslide. Parts of mammoths, including a few nearly intact mummified carcasses, with some well-preserved soft tissue and fur, have been found frozen in permafrost (not in ice). These carcasses have been found primarily deposits of silt & mud. All of the other mammoth carcasses show some signs of slow decay with poor preservation of internal organs. Even the previously best-preserved specimen (baby “Dima”) showed some signs of decay. Carcasses buried in mud in near-freezing conditions tend to be preserved fairly well.
Most animals die with food in their digestive systems and many die with food in their mouths. Most of the mammoths were found in the sort of alluvial deposits associated with flash floods, mudslides and bogs. Now, flash floods are catastrophic – But they are localized phenomena. They happen all the time. Animals don’t often finnish chewing their food, much less digesting it, before being entombed in mud downstream.
Animals tend to congregate near sources of water – Like rivers & streams. During the Pleistocene glacial stages, Siberia and much of the non-glaciated northern latitudes had an arid, steppe/savannah climate. Roughly every 1500 years, the climate would warm significantly (glacial interstadials, Dansgaard-Oeschger Events) and there was extensive melting of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. This led to lots of flash floods. Occasionally, massive lakes formed (Missoula, Agassiz, etc.). These lakes were impounded by giant dams of rock, sediment and ice. When these dams failed, floods of biblical proportion occurred; creating landforms like the Channeled Scablands. But these events occurred episodically on a regional scale, not synchronously on a global scale.
Baby Lyuba probably died toward the end of the the 38.5-36 KYA interstadial.
March 13, 2012 at 11:52 |
Fair point… I did harp on about the Carolina Bays a bit too much. There’s something about “scientific” assertions that ignore obvious geology that get me going.
The fact remains; there is no geochemical evidence of a major bolide at the onset of the Younger Dryas or any other Pleistocene glacial stadials.
Nanodiamonds and carbonaceous spherules in absence of elevated PGE and other geochemical signatures are not diagnostic of impact events… Particularly when the carbonaceous spherules are identical to fungal spores.
Climatologically, the Younger Dryas is non-unique. It is the last Pleistocene glacial stadial in a sequence of glacial stadials that occurred with almost clockwork regularity in the Pleistocene. If there’s an “anomaly,” it’s the Bølling-Allerød interstadial. Temperatures in Central Greenland during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial may have been nearly as warm as the Little Ice Age.
March 13, 2012 at 12:36 |
Melott – Full text
In modeling Tunguska and YD, Melott et al, assumed “half cometary ice and half rock for both events, but this matters little for atmospheric ionization.”
As Carlson wrote in the same issue of Geology,
The nitrate and ammonium anomalies in the GISP2 ice core at the onset of the YD do not support an impact event any larger than Tunguska.
March 13, 2012 at 16:37 |
If it was an impact, cometary or otherwise, it would have left a big crater and an obvious and global PGE anomaly.
A bolide might not have left a crater; but it would have produced a much larger nitrate anomaly than indicated in the GISP2 ice cores and it should also have left behind an obvious and global PGE anomaly.
There is no “global impactite layer.” And there’s no evidence of a climatic collapse in the Younger Dryas glacial stadial. It was climatologically indistinct from numerous previous glacial stadials.
What “peak in mammoth deaths”? Well-preserved mammoth carcasses fall into two groups. The largest group dates between 45 to 30 kya and a smaller group dates from 14-11 kya. 10,900 and the Younger Dryas fall into the second, smaller, grouping.
March 13, 2012 at 20:58 |
The Younger Dyras black mat facies span the entire interstadial. This facies is exhibited in about 2/3 of YD sequences. Black mat formation began before the YD onset and continued beyond the end of the YD. It’s a paleosol indicative of cool-wet conditions and/or elevated water tables (Haynes, 2008). It’s simply bizare that the impact fanatics seem to be calling this an impactite.
Surovell et al., 2009 tested 7 black mat sites, 2 of which were the same sites in Firestone et al., 2007, and found “no distinct peak in magnetic grains or microspherules uniquely associated with the YD.”
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