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Early Humans In Mexico

rynner2

rynner2

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Long article from the Indie
Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World.

The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City.

Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains.

However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today.

Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait.

The extreme age of Peñon woman suggests two scenarios. Either there was a much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across the Bering Strait and that these people were later replaced by a subsequent migration of Mongoloid people.

Alternatively, and more controversially, a group of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings.

Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans may have actually been Europeans.

"At the moment it points to that as being likely. They were definitely not Mongoloid in appearance. They were from somewhere else. As to whether they were European, at this point in time we cannot say 'no'," Dr Gonzalez said.
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...and much more.
 
Just received this on the AZTLAN mail list, i think it must've come from the BBC originally..
Tuesday, 3 December, 2002, 15:22 GMT
Human skulls are 'oldest Americans'

Tests on skulls found in Mexico suggest they are almost 13,000
years old - and shed fresh light on how humans colonised the
Americas. The human skulls are the oldest tested so far from the
continent, and their shape is set to inflame further a controversy
over native American burial rights.

The skulls were analysed by a scientist from John Moores
University in Liverpool, with help from teams in Oxford and
Mexico. They came from a collection of 27 skeletons of early
humans kept at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico
City.

" Mexico appears to have been a crossroads for people spreading
across the Americas " said Dr Silvia Gonzalez. These were
originally discovered more than 100 years ago in the area
surrounding the city.

The latest radiocarbon dating techniques allow dating to be
carried out on tiny quantities of bone, although the process is
expensive. Dr Silvia Gonzalez, who dated the skull, said: "The
museum knew that the remains were of significant historical value
but they hadn't been scientifically dated.

"I decided to analyse small bone samples from five skeletons
using the latest carbon-dating techniques. "I think everybody was
amazed at how old they were." The earliest human remains tested
prior to this had been dated at approximately 12,000 years ago.
Domestic tools dated at 14,500 years have been found in Chile -
but with no associated human remains.

The latest dating is not only confirmation that humans were
present in the Americas much earlier than 12,000 years, but also
that they were not related to early native Americans.

The two oldest skulls were "dolichocephalic" - that is, long and
narrow-headed. Other, more recent skulls were a different shape -
short and broad, like those from native American remains.

This suggests that humans dispersed within Mexico in two distinct
waves, and that a race of long and narrow-headed humans may have
lived in north America prior to the American Indians.

Traditionally, American Indians were thought to have been the
first to arrive on the continent, crossing from Asia on a land
bridge. Dr Gonzalez told BBC News Online: "We believe that the
older race may have come from what is now Japan, via the Pacific
islands and perhaps the California coast.

"Mexico appears to have been a crossroads for people spreading
across the Americas. "Our next project is to examine remains
found in the Baha penninsula of California, and look at their DNA
to see if they are related. "But this discovery, although it is
very significant, raises more questions than it solves."

Scientific analysis of early skull finds in the US has often been
halted by native American custom which assumes that any ancient
remains involve their ancestors and must be handed over. However,
this evidence that another race may have pre-dated native
Americans may strengthen legal challenges from researchers to
force access to such remains.

Dr Gonzalez said: "My research could have implications for the
ancient burial rights of north American Indians." Dr Gonzalez has
now been awarded a grant from the Mexican government and the UK's
Natural Environment Research Council to continue her work for
three years.

Back to top | BBC News Home | BBC Homepage | Feedback |

MikeRuggeri's Ancient America and Mesoamerica News and Links
http://community.webtv.net/Topiltzin-2091/AncientAmericaand
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It seems its a little too early to jump to conclusions about these findings as yet. and indeed, we are getting a much more 'interesting' picture emerging of the early peopling of the americas.

I did read somewhere, though i can't remember where, that a wreck of suspected roman galley had been found in a Brazilian harbour. anyone know anytrhing about this?
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1299197,00.html

Were lost tribe the real young Americans?

Tim Radford, science editor
Monday September 6, 2004

The bones of a lost Mexican tribe from the baking sands of Baja California have begun to tell a new story of the peopling of the Americas. Orthodoxy has it that the first American colonists crossed the Bering Straits 12,000 years ago at the close of the last Ice Age. They were people of Mongoloid origin from the Siberian steppes, and they spread slowly from Alaska to Patagonia, and they were the ancestors of all native American tribes. And they were brachycephalic: that is, they tended to have short, wide skulls.

But the Pericues, a people who went extinct in the 18th century, may tell a different story. Their skulls were dolicephalic: that is, long and thin. Other enigmatic evidence is beginning to emerge of an earlier settlement of America - perhaps as early as 30,000 years ago - by long-headed, seafaring people who may have crossed the Pacific by boat, migrating from island to island, until they reached the US Pacific coastline, Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool John Moores University, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Exeter.

"They appear more similar to southern Asians, Australian and populations of the South Pacific rim than they do to northern Asians," she said. "DNA analysis of the Mexican remains suggest that these people were at least partly contemporaneous to the first native American settlers on the continent. We think there were several migration waves into the Americas at different times by different human groups. The timing, route and point of origin of the first colonisation of the Americas remains the most contentious point in human evolution."

The Pericues lived an isolated life as hunter-gatherers with stone tools: Jesuit missionaries recorded their existence before they disappeared altogether. Dr Gonzalez's study of the collected bones in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is the first fruit of 11 projects investigating the role of environment in the evolution and dispersal of humanity, funded by Britain's natural environment research council. "Diet, dating and dispersal and all of these areas are very new science and we are getting new results to answer questions. said Clive Gamble, of the University of Southampton "We are interested in the response to climate change."
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Some info on the Pericue people here;
http://www.bajacalifologia.org/espanol/doc.north.htm
 
Good One

An interesting and informative article and I'd agree with its balanced conclusion that there were obviously several waves of settlers from various places at various times. Let's hope analysis of the bones and other archaeological finds can help pinpoint these long-skulled people's diet and range, and perhaps origin.
 
A longer article:

Divers Find Ancient Skeleton in Mexico

Thu Sep 9, 5:47 PM ET


By JOHN RICE, Associated Press Writer

MEXICO CITY - Divers making dangerous probes through underwater caves near the Caribbean coast have discovered what appears to be one of oldest human skeletons in the Americas, archaeologists announced at a seminar that was ending on Friday.


The report by a team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History exploits a new way of investigating the past. Most coastal settlements by early Americans now lie deep beneath the sea, which during the Ice Age was hundreds of feet lower than now.

Researchers at the international "Early Man in America" seminar here also reported other ancient finds — including a California bone that is a rival for the title of the oldest in the Americas.

The discoveries fall close to the start of the time that traditional theories say a so-called Clovis culture could have moved from Asia to Alaska over a temporary land corridor that began to open about 13,500 years ago.

Many academics argue that new discoveries, especially in South America, prove the Clovis people found existing inhabitants, who may have arrived by hopscotching past the northern ice fields in small boats.

Arturo Gonzalez said his team discovered at least three skeletons in caves along the Caribbean coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in 2001 and 2002. Photos showed two remarkably well preserved.

"It's something that I had been dreaming of for many years," said Gonzalez, 39, who has combined diving and research since he was a teenager. "To find a person who had walked those caves was like a treasure."

Gonzalez said the bones must date from before the time that waters gradually seeped through the caves 8,000 to 9,000 years ago as Ice Age glaciers melted and sea level rose by about 400 feet worldwide.

Tests on charcoal found beside one female skeleton would place it at least 10,000 years ago. An expert at the University of California, Riverside, dated it as 11,670 radiocarbon years old — which would translate to well over 13,000 calendar years.

If confirmed, "that would be the oldest" radio carbon date in the Americas obtained from a human bone, said archaeology textbook author Stuart Fiedel.

Fiedel, a defender of the "Clovis first" school, said the oldest estimate for the cave find still fits the Clovis time frame, though narrowly.

Larry Murphy, chief of the Submerged Resources Center for the U.S. National Park Service, said in a telephone interview that the Mexican exploration was "one of the first systematic studies of human materials associated with a submarine cave."

The discovery helps prove that humans inhabited the Yucatan at least 5,000 years before the famed Maya culture began building monuments at sites such as nearby Tulum.

Gonzalez said the skeleton did not appear to be Mayan, but with no tools yet found, almost nothing is known of those first inhabitants.

Gonzalez said cave divers had sometimes mentioned seeing skeletons and he convinced skeptical officials to finance a survey of the water holes that dot the Yucatan, a limestone shelf.

Extensive, flooded caves wind off from some of those holes. Many were above ground during the Ice Age and Gonzalez speculated people may have used them as paths down to fresh water.

Gonzalez said the oldest find was made 404 yards into a cave, more than 65 feet below sea level, during expeditions that can be extremely dangerous.

It took repeated trips to record the sites and excavate the bones, which then required two years of preservation.

Team co-director Carmen Rojas said the divers had 40 minutes to wind their way through the cave to the site, 20 minutes to work there and 40 minutes to swim back, followed by 20 to 60 minutes of decompression time.

"You train five years for those 20 minutes," she said.

Meanwhile, John Johnson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said an elaborate restudy of a woman's femur found on Santa Rosa Island in California's Channel Islands established a calendar-year age of 13,200 to 13,500 years. It had been calculated at about 1,000 years less when found in 1959.

Both discoveries would be significantly older than the skeleton known Kennewick Man — 9,300-year-old paleoindian remains found by teenagers along a Washington state riverbank in 1996.

Until now, the Americas have produced only 25 bones or skeletons dated as more than 8,000 years old, said Silvia Gonzalez of John Moores University in Liverpool, England. But she told the conference that she would soon publish a paper establishing that humans occupied a site near Puebla east of Mexico City 21,000 to 28,000 years ago.
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040909/ap_on_sc/mexico_first_americans

I know Silvia from back in the day - shes a lovely lady and it looks like her research is going great guns.
 
A New Tribe?

Source: British Information Services
Date: 2004-09-13
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/040913090256.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A New Tribe?
A new tribe is emerging from Mexico's scorched earth. A team of geoarchaeologists working on a programme investigating human evolution have found skeletal remains in the desert of the Baja California Peninsula that give rise to new theories on the colonisation of the Americas.

The team from the Natural Environment Research Council and led by Dr Silvia Gonzalez, analysed the DNA of skulls with markedly different morphologies to Native American Indians, commonly regarded as the first settlers of the Americas. The skulls are long and narrow, not in keeping with the Native Indians' broader, rounder features.

"They appear more similar to southern Asians, Australians and populations of the South Pacific Rim than they do to Northern Asians," said Dr Gonzalez of Liverpool John Moores University.

"DNA analysis of the Mexican remains suggest these people were at least partly contemporaneous to the first native American Indian settlers on the continent," she added.

"We think there were several migration waves into the Americas at different times by different human groups. The timing, route and point of origin of the first colonisation of the Americas remains a most contentious topic in human evolution."

This debate has been running for more than a century. Consensus is split between two camps: the first camp believe settlers came across the Bering Straits, from Russia to Alaska, at the end of the last ice age 12-15,000 years ago. Evidence for this theory comes from Clovis Points - huge tools used to hunt mammoths - found all over the American continent. DNA analysis of skeletal remains close to these Clovis Points suggest just four tribes are responsible for populating the continent. The second camp say colonisation happened much earlier than this, 20-30,000 years ago, but their techniques, using genetics, linguistics and dental morphology, have been steeped in controversy.

Dr Gonzalez's team have evidence of a previously unknown group, the Pericues, who went extinct in the 18th Century. She suggests this tribe may not have taken the traditional route to the continent.

The work is one of 11 projects investigating whether environmental factors played a part in human evolution and dispersal. Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the programme is tackling major anthropological questions such as: how did we become the only true global species? Why did our ancestors swap the tropical beaches of Africa for the icy tundra? How do we explain our trademark big brains? What role did climate play in making us adapt quickly to different environments?

The programme, Environmental Factors in the Chronology of Human Evolution and Dispersal, is truly global in its outlook with scientists working in South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and southern Asia.


###

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is one of the UK's seven Research Councils. It uses a budget of about £300 million a year to fund and carry out impartial scientific research in the sciences of the environment. It is addressing some of the key questions facing mankind such as global warming, renewable energy and sustainable economic development.

For more information on NERC's Environmental Factors in the Chronology of Human Evolution and Dispersal programme see http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/thematics/efched/.

The UK's progressive science and technology environment makes it the partner of choice for world-leading researchers, developers and academics eager to turn knowledge into innovation. Learn more about how the UK is developing science and technology for a new world at http://www.uksciencetech.com.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by British Information Services.
 
Footprints of 'first Americans'

Human settlers made it to the Americas 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence.
British scientists came to this controversial conclusion by dating human footprints preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico.

They say the first Americans may have arrived by sea, rather than by foot.

The currently accepted theory is that the continent's early inhabitants arrived 12,500 years ago, by crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

Details of the latest findings were unveiled at the UK Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition.

Ancient lake

Scientist Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool's John Moores University and her colleagues found the footprints in the quarry, some 130km (80 miles) south-east of Mexico, in 2003.

But they have only finished dating them this year.

"The footprints were preserved as trace fossils in volcanic ash along what was the shoreline of an ancient volcanic lake," Ms Gonzalez said.

She explained that curious early Americans would have most probably walked across the new shoreline as the volcano erupted.

Their footprints were soon covered in more ash and lake sediments and, when water levels rose, became as solid as concrete.

Ms Gonzalez says the tracks show that the first colonies may have arrived on water.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4650307.stm
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This really made me smile. A lot of serious american archaeologists are going to be feeling very stupid now, as they sit down to a plate of their words with a side order of humble pie...
 
Thats great stuff!! I know Silvia well and was actually sitting next to her at a conference when the ball started rolling. There were a couple of talks about the early colonisation of America including a very fancy model showing the progress of man across the continent from 11,000 years onwards. Her simple question was: But what about all the Mexican evidence that completely invalidates your model (probably put a bit nicer than that)? There was much shuffling of feet and urmming but no one knew about it. Later that day Chris Stringer spoke to her and basically said if you apply for funding I'll give it my support and will make my facilities available to study the human remains and she has been solidly working away in Mexico on this kind of material for the last 8 years now and it looks like it has paid off big time!!!

It also a good Fortean-style discovery - as is clear she hasn't yet got her doctorate and at the time she was working quietly in the labs at John Moores. However, she had some anomalous data and was prepared to confront the experts with it and she is reaping the rewards now as this (if it pans out and it should as a lot of the sites she was looking at were covered in volcanic material which makes it easy to date) looks to be one of the most important discoveries in American archaeology in a long time and should competlely change our picture of the appearance of humans in the New World.
 
New Scientist catches up! :D
Footprints rewrite history of first Americans
10:59 05 July 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Robert Adler

Human footprints discovered beside an ancient Mexican lake have been dated to 40,000 years ago. If the finding survives the controversy it is bound to stir up, it means that humans must have moved into the New World at least 30,000 years earlier than previously thought.

“If true, this would completely change our view of how and when the Americas were first colonised,” says Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. But like several US experts, he is reserving judgement until the dates can be independently confirmed.

The discovery was made by an international team led by Silvia Gonzalez, a geoarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. She found the fossilised footprints in 2003 in a quarry near the city of Puebla, 100 kilometres southeast of Mexico City. “I walked 1 metre and started to see them,” Gonzalez says. “It felt like a thunderbolt.”

In just two days, Gonzalez and her colleagues found hundreds of human and animal footprints preserved in a layer of ash from a nearby volcano. The footprints were made along the shore of a lake and were submerged after the water level rose, preserving them under sediments.

“They are unmistakably human footprints,” says team member Matthew Bennett at Bournemouth University in the UK. “They meet all the criteria that were set up after the Laetoli prints were found [in Tanzania in 1976].” The sizes suggests that about one-third of them were made by children.

Sand and shells
But when were they made? It has taken the team two years, using a panoply of high-tech dating techniques, to determine that the prints are about 40,000 years old.

The key date came from shells in the lake sediments, which the team carbon-dated to 38,000 years ago. Sand grains baked into the ash and dated using optically stimulated luminescence corroborated the finding.

The researchers also used argon-argon, uranium series and electron spin resonance techniques to date the layers. “The footprints are clearly older than 38,000 years,” says team member Tom Higham of the carbon-dating lab at the University of Oxford, US.

The conventional view is that humans arrived in the Americas via Beringia around 11,000 years ago, when a land bridge became available between Siberia and Alaska. There have been claims about earlier waves of settlers, who must have made the crossing over water, based mainly on sites with signs of habitation dated up to 40,000 years ago, but these claims have drawn intense criticism.

“Accurate and reproducible”
Gonzalez and her team expect the same. “This will be incredibly controversial, there’s no doubt about that,” Higham says. They invite other researchers to scrutinise their findings, due to be published in the journal Quaternary Science Review.

“We have done a year of solid work to make sure it’s accurate and reproducible,” Higham stresses.

How people got to Mexico 40 millennia ago is a matter for speculation. Bennett suspects that they migrated along the Pacific coasts of Asia and North America. But when it comes to the dates and footprints, he says, “those are not speculation at all".

The footprints remain where they were found. The team has used laser scans and rapid prototyping equipment to create highly accurate three-dimensional copies, accurate to a fraction of a millimetre, which can be viewed at the Royal Society's Summer Exhibition in London, UK, which ends on 7 July.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7627
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Brilliant stuff.

If I was Silvia Gonzalez I´d be prepared for an onslaught, a lot of careers have been built on the official version of the peopling of the Americas.

Somewhere out there there might be a clovis point with her name on it!
 
She sounds like she has the technology to have a go at Billy Meier's samples - if we ever get any!
 
This is very exciting, paradigm-shifting stuff but i cant help but feel worried by the fact that the results are being shown at an exhibition(?!?) rather than in some high impact factor peer-reviewed journal. Nature and Science should be falling over themselves to publish this stuff. Are there some problems with the dating that we dont know about?
 
What happens in a peer journal if all your peers refuse to review something because it doesn't fit?

My feeling is that the dating is sound because they are well aware of how controversial this is and it sounds like they've done everything they can to bulletproof it. There will still be a huge ruckus over it but this could be the final nail in the coffin of Clovis.

Is Sylvia Gonzalez American?
 
barndad said:
This is very exciting, paradigm-shifting stuff but i cant help but feel worried by the fact that the results are being shown at an exhibition(?!?) rather than in some high impact factor peer-reviewed journal. Nature and Science should be falling over themselves to publish this stuff. Are there some problems with the dating that we dont know about?
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The review process takes a while esp. if the results are going to be so controversial - I'd be very very suprised if this wasn't currently in the process of being published this is just the opening shots acros the bows. Results are often announced early at conferences and meetings.

---------------
Breakfast said:
What happens in a peer journal if all your peers refuse to review something because it doesn't fit?
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It doesn't really work like that. The only time it would be rejected is if the paper was awful and it just wouldn't get past the editors.

[edit: If the peer reviewers were rejecting or opinions were split then it gets sent out to a wider circle of reviewers. You can tell important things form the date a paper was submitted on and the date it was accepted ;) ]

This is a big news item and if the work looks solid (and I can't see her going for it if it wasn't) so I would have thought Nature and/or Science would be very interested in this. If not then other journals will take this on - smeone like Antiquity has taken on controversial dates like the very early (100,000 years ago) dates for early occupation of Australia (it was later blown out of the water but at least the put the informaiton out there).

Breakfast said:
My feeling is that the dating is sound because they are well aware of how controversial this is and it sounds like they've done everything they can to bulletproof it. There will still be a huge ruckus over it but this could be the final nail in the coffin of Clovis.
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Yeah I'm confident they wouldn't be putting their necks on the line if they weren't confident. Of course this is the start of a process and the stratigraphy and dating will be re-examined and gone over with a fine toothcomb so we'll see if it can survive all the scrutiny and the big guns that will be rolled out against it.

[edit: I just check the list of the collaborators on teh site below and all the dating has been done by people on the top of their game - you couldn't ask for better. So if they are going along with the announcements unless they are confident. Not to say they are right just confident ;) ]

Breakfast said:
Is Sylvia Gonzalez American?
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She is from Mexico, she married Graham Sherwood a palaeomagnetist at John Moores (he did his PhD on palaeomag in Mexico if I remmeber correctly and I always assumed they met through that somehow) where they both work in the Earth Science dept.

LJMU have a page up on this (they also refer to her as DR not Ms so it looks like she has got her doctorate which is good to hear) with photos:

The oldest American?

05 July 2005

LJMU research receives international media coverage

One of the 40,000 year old footprintsAn international team of geoarchaeologists, led by Dr Silvia Gonzalez from LJMU, have unearthed human footprints (see opposite) in central Mexico which they claim are around 40,000 years old, shattering previous theories on how humans first colonised the Americas.

Dr Gonzalez (pictured below) hopes that their preliminary findings will eventually help shed light on one of the most contentious debates in American history: who was there first and how did they get there? Interest in the discovery, launched at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition, is reflected in the extensive media coverage that the research has received both in the UK and internationally.

The foot prints were found in an abandoned quarry by Dr Gonzalez, Professor David Huddart (LJMU) and Professor Matthew Bennett (Bournemouth University) in 2003 and have been subsequently studied by a multinational team of scientists. The first stage of thisresearch focused on analysing 269 footprints, both animal and human, found close to the Cerro Toluquilla volcano in the Valsequillo Basin, near the city of Puebla, 130 km southeast of Mexico City.

Dr Silvia GonzalezNow thanks to the award of £212,000 from the Natural Environment Research Council, Dr Gonzalez and her research team will be able to carry out more extensive investigations to corroborate their initial findings and also calculate the height, pace and stride of the human population present 40,000 years ago. Such research would also give a better understanding of the relationship that these early Americans had with megafauna, such as mammoths, camels and other large animals.

Dr Gonzalez explained: ''The footprints were preserved as trace fossils in volcanic ash along what was the shoreline of an ancient volcanic lake. Climate variations and the eruption of the Cerro Toluquilla volcano caused lake levels to rise and fall, exposing the Xalnene volcanic ash layer.''

The geoarchaeologist suggests that the early Americans walked across this new shoreline, leaving behind footprints that soon became covered in more ash and lake sediments. The trails became submerged when the water levels rose again, so preserving the footprints.

The team's findings pose serious challenges to considered wisdom on the settlement of the continent.
Dr Gonzalez, working as part of the Natural Environment Research Council's 'Environmental Factors in the Chronology of Human Evolution and Dispersal (EFCHED) research programme, said: ''We think there were several migration waves into the Americas at different times by different human groups.''

This debate has been running for more than a century. The traditional view is that settlers crossed the Bering Straits, from Russia to Alaska, at the end of the last ice age - around 11,500 to 11,000 years ago. The discovery of human footprints in the Valsequillo Basin challenges this model, providing new evidence that humans settled in the Americas as early as 40,000 years ago.

Dr.Gonzalez continued: ''New routes of migration that explain the existence of these much earlier sites now need urgent consideration. Our findings support the theory that these first colonists may perhaps have arrived by water rather than on foot using the Pacific coast migration route.''

For further information on the footprints research, visit www.mexicanfootprints.co.uk
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www.livjm.ac.uk/news/default_64373.asp

Tonnes more info at the site listed.
 
good stuff. Just being my overly cautious self.
p.s. what do you do Emperor, if you dont mind my asking? Are you a palaeo/archaeo person?
 
barndad said:
good stuff. Just being my overly cautious self.
p.s. what do you do Emperor, if you dont mind my asking? Are you a palaeo/archaeo person?
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Geologist with a large side serving of archaeologist/palaeoanthropologist.
 
cool. So you'll be well familiar with both the geology jokes about "cleavage" and "cumingtonite".
/Used to live with geologists.
 
Getcha rocks off

barndad said:
cool. So you'll be well familiar with both the geology jokes about "cleavage" and "cumingtonite".
/Used to live with geologists.
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At LJMU we had a course called Crystalline Rocks And Process - don't get me started ;)
 
From a personal standpoint, this has been the year from hell, but scientifically - man oh man! My birding guru saw the news on the print crawl along the bottom of CNN while I was fixing supper the night of the announcement and shouted it out to me, and I felt like the ivorybilled woodpecker and Homo Floresienses all over again.

I notice that none of the news stories mention Monte Verde, the Chilean site which has already blown Clovis First out of the water, only the public face of American archaeology won't admit it. North American archeaologists are strangely unfamiliar with work done south of the English zone, even when that work is done in English (like Monte Verde), a fact which is remarked on regularly in publications I pick up but has not been systematically addressed. IMHO anyone doing pre-contact and early contact archeaology in the Americas ought to be at least reading-fluent in both English and Spanish.

The reluctance to discuss the probability of Asian boat people circumventing the ice is truly astonishing. The last two "First American" TV specials I've seen even preferred the Solutrean Hypothesis, which I will refrain from ranting about right now, to the simple, logical, and parsimonious boat route from Asia. It's not that the work isn't being done (see the Center for the Study of the First Americans at http://www.centerfirstamericans.com/cat.html?c=4 for samples), just that it's not getting covered in the mainstream press.

The argument that they're not really footprints, posted the next day, would seem to be the conservatives' first line of defense. I look forward to finding out more, but it's going to be a long-drawn out process, and I'm afraid Clovis First, like many another paradigm, will only die with the youngest of its proponents who can't change their minds. It's a shame, because many of the Clovis Police do excellent work and have in their day been innovative and enlightening in ways which should not be threatened by an older occupation date. It's bizarre how people who should know better dig their heels in over this - as if the ghost of Ales Hrdlcka were still breathing over their shoulders and threatening their jobs.
 
Mind you, they're probably thinking of Glen Rose and the dinosaur footprints that look vaguely human. I think most American diggers-of-stuff are slightly traumatized by that. The difference in scale ought to allow them to relax, though. Forty thousand years, though further back than I would have pushed the dates with any confidence myself, is not all that long geologically, and the only question is, did homo sapiens make it to America at about the same time it made it to Northern Europe, or not?

Too bad the Mexican footprings homepage http://www.mexicanfootprints.co.uk/ doesn't have more pictures up. I'm drooling to see the human-appearing footprints in context with the animal footprints. Not that I'm any good at tracking, myself, but if the animal tracks from the same strata leap out and say: "Hi, I'm a puma! Hi, I'm a wolf! Hi, I'm a bear!" then the "hi, I'm a human" ones will be much more securely identifiable.
 
Footprint claims get stamped on

Published online: 30 November 2005;
| doi:10.1038/news051128-7
Footprint claims get stamped on
Age data knock first impressions of marks in Mexican rock.
Rex Dalton



Marks that were hailed as the earliest traces of humans in the Americas may not be what they seem. A dating study puts the age of the volcanic ash in which the indentations were found at 1.3 million years, which casts fatal doubt on the theory that they are footprints.

Researchers began investigating the site, at Valsequillo Lake near Puebla in southern Mexico, after the discovery of the footprint-like impressions was made public in July (see "Ancient 'footprints' found in Mexico"). Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford, UK, calculated that they were 40,000 years old, making them the oldest evidence of human occupation of the New World.

But now geochronologist Paul Renne, of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, has produced data showing that the volcanic ash layer is so old it is "highly unlikely" that the markings are footprints.

I'm totally unconvinced they are footprints.

Paul Renne
Berkeley Geochronology Center



Rocked theory

Renne and his colleagues used two dating techniques, one examining the ratios of chemical isotopes in the ash and another looking for magnetic signals from the sediments. They publish their results online in Nature1.

"I'm totally unconvinced by the argument that they are footprints," says Renne. But he adds that he cannot be absolutely certain, because of the tiny possibility that they were made by an earlier relative of humans.




The controversial 'footprints' now seem to be more than a million years old.

© Berkeley Geochronology Center

"It is conceivable there were hominids in the New World 1.3 million years ago," says Renne. "That would make it the find of the century in archaeology."

The oldest Homo sapiens fossils are African and date to 160,000 years ago. The oldest evidence of humans in the Americas is at Monte Verde in Chile, where occupation is dated to about 14,500 years ago.

Shelling out

The original footprint claim was made by Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican geoarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. The 40,000-year date was based on radiocarbon analysis of shells in the layer above the ash at the nearby Toloquilla quarry.

Neither Gonzalez nor any other member of her team has commented on Renne's report, saying that they will respond with a scientific analysis after reviewing the data.

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Gonzalez says she will return to the site early next year to try to find incontrovertible evidence of footprints protected in ash layers. She has been given US$370,000 by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council to pursue her work.

Tim White, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that Renne's report indicates "the argument is over" on the markings, "unless indisputable footprints can be found sealed within the ash". Gonzalez's previous evidence "is not sufficient to convince me they are footprints", he adds.

References
RenneP .R., et al. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature04425 (2005).

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051128/ ... 128-7.html
Click to expand...
 
'Footprints' debate to run and run
By Martin Redfern
BBC radio science unit



It was a sensational discovery - human footprints said to be 40,000 years old, preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico.
The announcement, in July last year, created a flurry of excitement, but was then promptly dismissed by a second team of researchers who re-dated the rocks at 1.3 million years old, impossibly ancient to bear human traces.

The original claim has not gone away, however.

The first widespread evidence for the human occupation of North America came from the town of Clovis in New Mexico.


Suddenly, I began to see some marks on the top surface of the ash... and I recognised them as human footprints
Dr Silvia Gonzalez, JMU

The beautiful fluted stone-spearpoints made by the Clovis people are found on many sites and date back 11,500 years or so. They are believed to have been left by people who crossed a land bridge that once existed between Siberia and Alaska.
But there is an increasing body of evidence for earlier occupation of the Americas, dating back to a time when the overland route through the ice would have been impossible.

'Car park'

The best evidence probably comes from Monte Verde in Chile and dates back at least 12,500 years. But to have reached so far south by then, people must have entered the continent earlier still.

There have been many claims of earlier dates, but few have been substantiated. So the announcement of 40,000-year-old footprints from Mexico was greeted with scepticism and caution.





It came from a team led by Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican working at Liverpool John Moores University (JMU), UK.
In 2003, she was visiting a site at Cerro Toluquilla in the Valsequillo Basin. It is near Puebla, about 100km southeast of Mexico City.

It is a dry environment with many small volcanoes and, in the distance, the smoking peak of Popocatepetl. She was hoping to find the geological context of deposits that had yielded animal bones showing possible butchery marks and dating back 20 or 30,000 years.

The researchers were looking for a vertical section through the rocks in the side of a small quarry, but it was overgrown and strewn with debris.

As they were about to give up, they noticed that the floor of the quarry was made of a single layer of hardened volcanic ash called the xalnene tuff. It looks a bit like a badly asphalted car park.

'Mechanical' marks

Silvia Gonzalez had studied much younger human tracks in Lancashire and thought she could see similar markings in the volcanic ash.

"Suddenly, I began to see some marks on the top surface of the ash... and I recognised them as human footprints," she told the BBC's Unearthing Mysteries programme.


There are no trails of footprints that are consistent, the shapes don't really look like footprints, and, most importantly, there's a huge diversity of shapes, sizes and arrangements of these things
Prof Paul Renne, Berkley Geochronology Center

"I felt quite shocked, because I knew already that this ash was very old."
At first, her colleagues laughed at her, but soon they were brushing away the dust with excitement.

A large area of the quarry has now been cleared and the researchers are making a detailed digital laser survey of the marks.

Some are clearly animal tracks left by perhaps deer and buffalo and running for several metres.

Others do seem to resemble human footprints though there are few in a continuous track. They are of several sizes suggesting both adults and children.


The ash is too coarse to have left clear toe prints but some certainly appear to be from left or right feet with a raised arch and material bunched up behind the toes as the person pushed forwards up the gentle slope.
Gonzalez' colleague at JMU, Professor Dave Huddart, demonstrated the likeness to his own feet: "If I put my foot beside it, size 8½, it looks a typical size; it's got the characteristic figure-of-eight shape and the big toe is there, so it's a left foot."

Professor Mike Waters of Texas A&M University is sceptical. He thinks the marks are products of the quarrying process and subsequent erosion. There are certainly some marks at the site that are very obviously due to that and seem much fresher - pick marks and tracks from mechanical diggers.

'Complex' scenario

More controversial still are the dates. Colleagues of Silvia Gonzalez at Oxford University used a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) that records the last time rocks were exposed to sunlight or heat.

That gave a variety of dates from the overlying sediments, but when applied to small fragments of what looked like brick or burnt clay within the volcanic ash, it produced a date of about 40,000 years.


POSSIBLE MIGRATION ROUTES
(1) Kennewick Man remains are about 8,800 years old
(2) Santa Island Rosa bones date back 10,960 years
(3) Clovis site with stone spearpoints - 11,500 years ago
(4) Toluquilla 'footprints' are claimed to be 40,000 years old
(5) Peñon Woman III in California - 10,800 years ago
(6) Monte Verde site in Chile - 12,500 years ago

That initially shocked Dr Gonzalez as it implied by far the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas. But it fitted in with dates of up to 38,000 years based on carbon 14 in shells in the sediments above.
In December, however, Paul Renne of the Berkley Geochronology Center in California published dates for the volcanic ash itself based on the powerful argon-argon technique.

That gave an age of 1.3 million years, far too old to be compatible with human footprints.

"I don't think that they are [footprints]," he told the BBC. "There are no trails of footprints that are consistent, the shapes don't really look like footprints, and, most importantly, there's a huge diversity of shapes, sizes and arrangements of these things."

Professor Renne measured the age of several different grains in the ash and got the same age for each. Dr Gonzalez, though, says that the volcano responsible is complex.

It interrupted explosively underneath a lake and lots of older material and lake sediment may have been caught up in the ash, distorting the date.

Further work

Furthermore, there do not seem to be the signs of erosion and weathering that would be expected if there had been a gap of more than a million years between the ash and the overlying sediments.

Professor Renne also looked at the magnetisation of the rocks, partly to see if they might have been jumbled up and redeposited from an earlier material, which, he says, they were not.


But he did find that the magnetic polarity was the opposite of the Earth's present magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic poles do occasionally flip.
"The last time the Earth's magnetic field had consistently reversed polarity was about 790,000 years ago, so the fact that we found reversed polarity magnetisation in this rock tells us that it's older than 790,000 years," he said.

Silvia Gonzalez' view? "We know that there are short-term 'excursions' of the magnetic field, and one of those happened 40,000 years ago, very interestingly."

Professor Renne: "How did I know they were going to say that? There is a finite possibility that that is correct, but the probability is extremely low."

It seems this debate really is going to run and run.

To answer the criticisms, Dr Gonzalez and her colleagues hope now to get permission to excavate for further footprints that would not be associated with any quarrying marks and to get more secure and consistent dates for the rocks.

"That would convince even the most intense critics," she said. "We need to talk to each other to make a continental model of human migration across the Americas. It won't be done in a few years. It will take a lifetime, but we are not afraid to do that."

If she succeeds, this little quarry could become one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas.

A final comment from Professor David Meltzer, from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. He has researched and written extensively on the subject of the "first Americans". He told the BBC: "I'm not averse to the idea of 40 000-year-old people in the New World - but I'm sceptical because we've been fooled before.

"We want to see it confirmed with all the evidence laid out so that we're not buying in to something that isn't there."

A BBC Radio 4 team has been to the site to assess the evidence for themselves. Unearthing Mysteries with Aubrey Manning is broadcast on the network on Tuesday, 17 January, at 1100 GMT. It will then be archived on the Unearthing Mysteries website

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/s ... 617466.stm

Published: 2006/01/16 18:55:52 GMT

© BBC MMVI
Click to expand...
 
Another previous report:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051130232517.htm

and an update:

ARCHAEOLOGY

Cloud of scholarly dust rises over ancient footprints claim

Tuesday, April 25, 2006
BRADLEY T. LEPPER

Are the footprints of surprisingly ancient Americans preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash in southern Mexico? In December, an article in the journal Science cast a cloud of doubt over that claim.

The authors, Michael Waters and Paul Renne, argue that the ash dated to 1.3 million years ago, much too old for humans on this continent, and that the so-called footprints were nothing more than marks made by the tools of modern workers quarrying the stone with crowbars.

Now, Silvia Gonzalez, an archaeologist from Liverpool John Moores University, and several members of her research team have published their data and interpretations in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Based on their results, the case is far from closed.

According to the researchers, the early dates for the ash are wrong. They note that the overlying deposits range in age from 9,000 to 40,000 years, with no evidence of significant breaks in the sequence.

Moreover, an article in the March issue of the Mammoth Trumpet states that Gonzalez and her team have dated lake sediments below the ash layer to about 100,000 years ago, which would mean the ash had to be considerably younger than the date reported in Science.

Gonzalez and her co-authors also claim the "footprints" are distinct from recent tool markings, which are sharply defined and unweathered.

Also, many of the footprints appear to preserve details of foot anatomy that would not be duplicated by quarry tool divots. Finally, and most importantly, the team has identified more "potential footprints" in nearby locations "where no quarrying operations have occurred."

Gonzalez told the Mammoth Trumpet that the only way to fully answer the critics would be "to excavate an area where there has been no quarry activity and uncover more footprints. We will do this as soon as we can."

The most famous ancient footprints are the 3.6 million-year-old tracks of early human ancestors excavated by Mary Leakey at Laetoli in Tanzania, Africa.

In the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, Australian scientists announced the discovery of 23,000-year-old trackways of human footprints in western New South Wales.
Click to expand...

Source
 
9,900-year-old skeleton of horribly disfigured woman found in Mexican cave

Source: livescience.com
Date: 5 February, 2020

The woman's skull had three injuries, likely from a hard object, and a dents, possibly from a syphilis-like disease.

Divers discovered the ancient woman's remains in the Chan Hol cave, near Tulum, Mexico. The underwater survey was led by Jerónimo Avilés, a speleologist (cave explorer and researcher) at the Museum of the Desert of Coahuila.

Cave divers have discovered the eerie underwater grave of an ancient woman with a deformed skull who lived on the Yucatán Peninsula at least 9,900 years ago, making her one of the earliest known inhabitants of what is now Mexico.

The woman's skull had three distinct injuries, indicating that something hard hit her, breaking the skull bones. Her skull was also pitted with crater-like deformations, lesions that look like those caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis, a new study finds.

"It really looks as if this woman had a very hard time and an extremely unhappy end of her life," study lead researcher Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a professor of biostratigraphy and paleoecology at the Institute for Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University in Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Obviously, this is speculative, but given the traumas and the pathological deformations on her skull, it appears a likely scenario that she may have been expelled from her group and was killed in the cave, or was left in the cave to die there."

https://www-livescience-com.cdn.amp...ience.com/early-american-underwater-cave.html
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
Another previous report:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051130232517.htm
and an update ...
Click to expand...

Here's a later update ...

In this 2010 research paper the authors conclude the alleged footprints aren't footprints at all ...

Techniques for verifying human footprints: reappraisal of pre-Clovis footprints in Central Mexico
Sarita Amy Morse, Matthew R. Bennett, Silvia Gonzalez, David Huddart

Quaternary Science Reviews
Volume 29, Issues 19–20, September 2010, Pages 2571-2578

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.03.012
Abstract
Verification of human footprints within the geological record provides critical evidence of presence as well as information on the biomechanics of the individuals who made those prints. Consequently, the correct identification of human footprints is important, but is something for which critical and objective criteria do not exist. The current paper attempts to address this issue by presenting a new statistically based approach to the verification of human footprints. The importance of this is illustrated by the recent controversy surrounding a series of marks identified as human prints in the Valsequillo Basin in Central Mexico dated originally to 40 000 years ago. The dating of these marks remains highly controversial with some teams placing their age at 1.3 million years old. Irrespective of this debate the crucial question that must be addressed is whether or not they represent evidence of human presence. Using an objective statistically based methodology developed here, these controversial marks are re-examined and found to be of questionable origin, as they are inconsistent with a suite of other, known human and hominin prints. Consequently, we argue that they should be removed as evidence in the ongoing controversy surrounding the colonization of the Americas.
Click to expand...

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379110000909

For more about the ongoing controversy over these "footprints", see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xalnene_Tuff_footprints
 
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