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The First Americans (Peopling Of The Americas)

And the confirmatory science gets done, bit by bit by bit...

I've believed in Asian sailors beating Clovis since before Monte Verde (for story logic reasons rather than scientific - I'm allowed to do that 'cause I write fiction not theses) and Haynes is of the Clovis Police, but he's not wrong about the limited number of sites investigated here and the fact that we don't know how long it would take a population to spread over the Americas since we don't know their goals or modes of transportation. The first matter is a small one, since reexamining the dating of all the Clovis sites in America is going to take awhile and can be expected to get done. The second matter is a fruitful criticism, because it highlights the sort of information we need to be actively seeking. It's not enough to stumble across sites and dig them up and see what the data are. You have to form a hypothesis, determine likely locations to contain the sort of data that would confirm or deny the hypothesis, and then go dig as many of those locations as you can.

Coastal archeology - it's the way to go. My next life I'm gonna be an archeologist with tribal affiliations and I'm gonna be the expert on those boat people. Assuming we have enough civilization to support the endeavor by then.
 
PeniG said:
Coastal archeology - it's the way to go. My next life I'm gonna be an archeologist with tribal affiliations and I'm gonna be the expert on those boat people. Assuming we have enough civilization to support the endeavor by then.
By then, the Ice Age coastline will probably be even further underwater than it is now...


Ooh. look how early the flowers are coming out this spring!

Yeah, but this high tide's way above prediction......
:shock:
 
That worries me, too, rynner, but nobody ever promised me a rose garden. Or if he did, he was a damn liar.

I figure if civilization survives enough for me to do archeology, it has a strong motive to improve its underwater-exploration technology.
 
Fortunately maritime and underwater archaeology are improving by leaps and bounds. However doing an underwater dig is 50-150 times more expensive than a conventional land one

Untill they can come up with a method that allows more time on the surface (floor of the sea) such digs will be SLOW and COSTLY
 
Yup, but the question is one of value for money. Until the offshore work is done, we won't know the answers to certain questions and archeologists (who can't work by story logic nearly as freely as I can) will be limited in the kinds of hypotheses they can state for the record.

Although no one says it out loud, the sheer stonewalling viciousness of the Clovis First argument, with some extremely experienced and intelligent folks who ought to know better on the side of the Clovis Police (Haynes is one; Christy Turner is another; and it would be hard to overstate the importance and high quality of their work - these are not a bunch of lazy uncurious bozos), IMHO really does come down to funding and prestige. There's only so much to go around and they go together. If you've built yourself a good tall heap to stand on top of, it's easy to convince yourself that you have sound scientific reasons to knock down your neighbor's competing heap when, if successful, it would undermine yours. There's an artificial glamor attached to "firsts." Clovis is an important and fascinating period and much work remains to be done on it - but "my" Asian boat people would divert all kinds of public interest from them, and hence, dollars. And it'll take awhile for habits of thought to change in the written record.

There is not and never has been any particular reason to think that "Clovis" was a people. Clovis is a technology. You might as well call modern Americans "Electronics" or "internal combustion engines." My own mental reconstruction based on the data is: Asian boat people colonize the coastlines right round America, exploring the interior by small boat. (Oooh, sudden flash on that first trip up the Mississippi! Gators! Giant beavers! Vast clouds of whooping cranes!) Clovis technology permits permanent colonization of the interior by allowing people to hunt the abundant terrestrial game and travel across watersheds as well as along them.

It's simple, it's logical. Clovis might have been an innovation coming in with a new population from Asia down that old Ice-Free Corridor, but the data at the moment argue for it being an invention of a southern population. The technology appears to spread from the south to the north, but we don't know much at all about the method of spread or the people who carried it. Maritime peoples are remarkably mobile, and there could have been any number of waves of immigration, not to mention remigration.

I want to know about Clovis, but I want data to refine, confirm, or refute my hypothesis, too. Archeology has to be done slowly and carefully, but it doesn't have to be this slow. If only we'd spend as much money on digging up ancestors as we do on killing our neighbors!
 
Submarine to Search for Early Americans
By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
2 March 2007

When humans first trekked from Asia to North America, perhaps as long as 25,000 years ago, the continent was gripped by ice sheets and glaciers. Those hardy immigrants probably traveled by boat or along the shore, where finding food and shelter would have been easier. The trouble for archaeologists is that as the ice melted, the seas rose and covered any traces of this early migration. Now marine geologists and archaeologists are hunting for underwater clues in the Gulf of Mexico.

This morning, a research expedition steamed out of the Port of Galveston, Texas, for the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, about 180 kilometers off the coast of Texas and Louisiana. Led by Robert Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut, and Kevin McBride of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, the expedition consists of a 44-meter-long Navy research submarine, two ships, and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

The submarine and ROV will survey the bottom of the reef, 120 meters deep, which is thought to have been the location of the shoreline some 20,000 years ago. The reef is built atop large reserves of salt, and Ballard says it's possible that Native Americans would have mined it from caves or tunnels. "We're confident something is out there; we just need to see if we can find it," Ballard said at a press conference yesterday. The research isn't all archaeology; scuba divers from one of the research vessels will also observe conch, parrotfish, and manta rays on the shallow reefs.

"It's a worthwhile endeavor," says archaeologist Michael Walters of Texas A&M University in College Station. "The Gulf Coast is a logical place to look for submerged sites." But David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says that the salt deposits wouldn't have been his first target. Rather, Meltzer says that there is certainly a submerged site, about 13,000 years old, from which spearheads wash onto McFaddin Beach, Texas. "You'd probably have much better chance" of finding artifacts there, he says. As for older signs of human presence, Meltzer adds, the place to go is the Pacific Northwest, where the immigrants first arrived.

Related sites

Updates from the expedition
Brief introduction the origins of Native Americans
More on Clovis-age spear points
More on the Clovis culture


http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 2007/302/2
 
McFaddin Beach would have been my first impulse, too - there's a beachcomber who brings back point after beautiful Clovis point washed up there by repeated tides, so you know there's either an offshore site or an expert flintknapper salting the area. But it's a little isolated compared to Flower Banks and might have fewer resources in case of malfunctions or difficulties. Or maybe they're tired of points and want to go for broke. McFaddin Beach may be getting a big cache washed up onto it, in which case all you'd find are the points, learning nothing new; whereas an old salt mine might turn up different things, including perishibles like the baskets or bags used to collect the salt, preserved underwater. That would be so rad!

Happy dancing, regardless of why they chose the site.
 
boiseweekly.com/gyrobase/Con ... d%3A218175
Link is dead. The MIA article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2017102...ise/were-basques-the-first/Content?oid=931305



Were Basques The First?
Recent discoveries add an intriguing wrinkle to the human map

From out of the Earth

BY DR. ROBERTA T. AXIDEA

Little did Domingo "Buzzy" Ybargoitia know that by drilling a well to bring water to his sheep, he would change the way we view the history of humans in the New World.

"My girls need to drink, that's all I was thinking about. It gets mighty dry around here come late summer anymore. I don't know what's going on, but I do know my granpoppa never had any trouble keeping his flock watered, and my pop didn't either. But I've had to truck it in from Marsing when it gets really hot."

Ybargoitia manages his family's sheep operation in Idaho's lonely Owyhee Mountains, an hour's drive over rough roads from the tiny Oregon village of Jordan Valley. Two years ago this coming April, he brought a drilling contractor from Nampa to install a dependable well. It was tough drilling until they got through the dense lime deposits, or caliche, that underlies so much of this remote southwest corner of Idaho.

"A couple of times, I was afraid those boys were going to give up," says Ybargoitia. "They'd pull their bit out of the shaft and just shake their heads when they saw how chunked up it was getting."

On the second morning of drilling, they unearthed an astonishing surprise. The hole was below the caliche, down to about 26 feet, when Ted Burquart of the drill crew pulled what looked to be a child's doll from the mud and sand accumulating next to the hole.

"At first, I just thought it was just one of those Troll dolls you see hanging from rearview mirrors," explained Burquart. "I wiped the crud off and took a better look at it. It was whittled out of rock, I could tell that much. And what I thought was crazy Troll hair all flattened out was really a funny little cap. Like a beret, maybe."

Ybargoitia knew immediately what it was. As a youth, he had spent too many years with the Oinkari folk dancers of Boise to not recognize a traditional Basque txapela, even if it was small enough to top a five-inch figure. He stopped the drilling and sifted through the pilings with his fingers, wondering what else might have been brought up. Within minutes, he had found several blades, chipped to a razor's edge on both sides, ranging from 9 to 20 centimeters long. Each one had a notch into which a spear haft could be set. He also found a small, partially-eaten and mummified sheep thigh, impaled on a nearly petrified willow skewer.

"Back then, I didn't know a Clovis point from a Buck knife, but I sure as heck know a lamb kebab when I see one."

He was also relatively certain that all of these items--particularly the primitive figurine--were highly unusual coming from so far below the surface. Ybargoitia sent the drill crew home, gathered up everything he'd found into his lunch box, and called the Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, Oregon. He was referred to the Cultural Anthropology Department.

"When Buzzy showed me those things, I about fell out of my chair," said Dr. Benton Schrall, the department head. "North American artifacts aren't exactly my field. Still, I recognized immediately that he had stumbled onto something very significant."

That afternoon, Dr. Schrall e-mailed a colleague at Washington State University in Pullman, who put him in touch with Dr. Lawrence Riggs, the chairman of WSU's Archaeology Department. Said Dr. Schrall, "When I described to Larry what I had, right there on my desk, the first thing out of his mouth was, 'Whatever you do, don't tell any Indians about it!' I guess he got burned pretty bad on that Kennewick Man deal."

With two of his brightest grad students in tow, Dr. Riggs drove to Ontario the next day. As soon as he saw the artifacts, he knew exactly what he would be doing for the next several summers. "Clovis points in Idaho? And from 7 meters down! That alone is an archaeologist's dream, without even considering the totem figure."

Fearful of letting that figurine out of his sight, Dr. Riggs shaved a thin specimen from the bottom of one tiny foot and sent it to Le Duchamp Laboratoire in Lyons, France, a world leader in intra-spectral comparative analysis. He then spent the next six weeks organizing what would become the largest--and most covert--archaeological dig in Idaho's history. Even Ybargoitia was sworn to secrecy.

"Larry Riggs had me sign a paper that said as long as I didn't tell anyone else about what I'd found, his university would foot the bill for another well. He came down on spring break, along with a nine-seater van full of students, and they set up a cyclone fence around that spot and put a tent over the hole. It about killed me that I couldn't tell anybody. It was like getting to be in a movie or something, only I couldn't even let my friends know I was in it."

The excavation proper began after the semester ended on May 21, 2005, and by Labor Day of that year, Dr. Riggs had confirmed what his instincts had been telling him since he first saw the figurine. Le Duchamp lab sent him their analysis of the sample in early July. They had tested the specimen three times, and for further confirmation, they had sent a portion to another independent laboratory in Quebec to verify their findings. There could be no mistake: The sample was from a unique soapstone found only in a region of northern Spain, on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains.

It took 10 weeks of excruciatingly detailed soil removal for the team to get down as far as the drill bit had reached, but at a depth of just under 8 meters--the investigators came across a strata of soot and charcoal, indicating the remains of an ancient campfire. Within a 5-meter radius of that fire pit, they uncovered a dozen more spear tips--sophisticated Clovis points, all of them--the gnawed bones of several seemingly domestic sheep, a shredded remnant of what appeared to be a leather drinking sack (a bota), and a human skull.

By summer's end, Dr. Riggs had circumstantial evidence that early humans had migrated to this hemisphere from the Iberian Peninsula. But most astounding was the level at which this body of evidence had been found. The geological strata in which the items lay dated from a very narrow (and little understood) time frame known as the Proto-Paleolithic, indicating that human beings had put their footprint on the New World 40,000 years before anyone had previously believed possible.

Even more momentous were the "associative implicatory collateral traces," as they are called in the field of paleoanthropology, which implied that wherever these people came from, they brought their sheep with them.

Rattling the time line

It has long been held that nomadic homo sapiens first found their way to this continent, then on to South America, by crossing a land bridge that resulted when ice age glaciation drastically lowered water levels in the Bering Sea, thereby exposing a 1,300-kilometer-wide path from Siberia to Alaska. Less than 100 years ago, those who studied human migration patterns believed this gradual population of the Americas began no more than 5,000 years BP (before present).

But, owing much to refined archaeological methods after the turn of the last century, relics have turned up that demonstrate humans came to these shores much earlier. The first Clovis points (named after the New Mexico town near the discovery site) were found in 1932. A decade earlier, an even more sophisticated--though lesser known--tool was found, also in New Mexico, called the "Folsom point." Even more obscure are the "Cincinnati points," disinterred when a mound-builder tomb was viciously scraped flat by a mentally disturbed individual with a bulldozer in the mid-1950s.

Yet it was the Clovis points that reshaped the chronological map of the earliest Americans. The venerable archaeological establishment--referred to affectionately by eager newcomers as the "Stuffy Petes"--was shaken to its core to learn the Clovis culture dated back to between 11,500 and 13,500 years.

For decades, alternative theories have flourished as to how humans came to be here, the most notable being that the first settlers didn't come across the Bering Bridge at all, but instead made their way around the ice fields of the North Atlantic--a la the kayaking Inuit--from the prehistoric Solutrean culture of central France. Yet all trace of Solutrean influence ends in Europe around 15,000 BP, indicating that if there is any truth to the so-called "Solutrean Solution," it would put humans in the New World 5,000 years before the occurrence of the Clovis culture. (Current mainstream archaeology holds that it is likely the Solutrean tool-makers were overcome by the more advanced Magdelinian culture--which created the magnificent rock art in the Lascaux caves--and were either gradually absorbed, or were eaten when the mammoth supply dried up.)

There is another hypothesis that Pleistocene Era Scandinavians were the first to reach these lands, but this notion has been widely discredited and is taken as a serious possibility only by the notorious Viking cults and fringe archaeological communities in Stockholm and Oslo.

With all of this to consider, Dr. Riggs had a serious problem on his hands. When all preceding evidence--and even the wildest of theoretical conjecture--put humans in this hemisphere no earlier than 20,000 years BP, how was he to convince his peers that he had proof men were here 60,000 years ago?

The Pamplona Connection

In mid-September of 2005, the excavation had to be put on hold because of the '05-'06 school year. Dr. Riggs locked down the site and returned to Pullman, threatening his student helpers with dire consequences should they, in any way, share their secret.

"I told them they had a choice. Either keep this discovery under their hats, or find themselves a nice little junior college somewhere and transfer to it."

As to the man who owned the land on which the site lay, Riggs promised Ybargoitia that if he continued his silence, the skull would be named in his honor.

"I was still itching to tell someone," explained the rancher. "But after Doc Larry made that offer, I zipped up like a pair of Wrangler straight-legs. 'Ybargoitia erectus ...' got a nice ring to it, don't you think?"

Over the ensuing months, Riggs could not keep his mind off the project. He Fed-Ex'ed several individual Clovis points to experts around this country and Canada with the caveat that he could not divulge where the blades originated, but that he believed them to be hoaxes and was looking for confirmation to that effect. Every last artifact returned along with the opinion it was indisputably authentic.

Riggs personally delivered the skull to the Northwest's top forensic archaeo-reconstructionist, Sir Bingham Smythe-Peebles, who at the time was on the faculty of the University of Idaho, 10 miles away in Moscow. It was the garrulous and eccentric Smythe-Peebles, a transplant from Great Britain, who determined the skull's sex and recorded all the cranial measurements. He reconstructed a clay face over a plaster casting of the skull, using a technique developed by his mentor, Sir Clyde McManus of Cambridge. (The author has not seen for herself that reconstruction, but it is rumored the features strongly resemble those of Robert Beltran, better known as Commander Chakotay from Star Trek Voyager.)

Smythe-Peebles also made a cast of the skull's dental configuration, which Riggs compared to the bite patterns on the mummified lamb's hindquarters. It was not a match, so obviously, Ybargoitia erectus was not a solitary traveler.

Finally, it was Smythe-Peebles who discovered the smidgen of soft tissue, preserved almost miraculously within a bicuspid on the upper jaw. He and Dr. Riggs arranged with three different DNA testing facilities--including the FBI lab in Virginia--to have this tissue analyzed. (Tragically, Sir Smythe-Peebles didn't live long enough to learn of the results. He fell off a skywalk in Spokane in March 2006 in an attempt to get away from a former student who was stalking him because she was convinced he was really the actor John Cleese.)

As soon as finals were over the following May, Riggs was back at work in the Owyhees, scraping diligently away at the site. By then, he had an even greater mystery to ponder. The DNA results had returned from two of the labs he had queried, and it was perplexing news, to say the least. (In typical fashion, the FBI lab had misplaced the sample that had been sent to them, and when it was finally located, it was incorrectly labeled with the name of a suspected organized crime victim whose body had been discovered when an Atlantic City casino was demolished. As of this writing, they are still trying to sort it out.)

The labs had been fortunate enough to find mitochondrial DNA within the samples, and as requested, they compared that DNA to all the identified human family groups. Both labs came to the same conclusion: This skull belonged to one, and only one, human sub-population, found today primarily in northern Spain/southern France. He was a Basque.

"When I found out about that," says Ybargoitia, "My hair stood up on end. My granpoppa came over here from Pamplona in '29 and started running sheep on these same hills. And now, they find this old Basque fella down there in the ground. That's one heck of a coincidence, if you ask me."

Dr. Riggs believes it to be more than mere coincidence. In November 2006, he announced his discovery to a limited audience of academic archaeologists and released his evidence for peer review. In January of this year, it became available to the general public. Yet it was over the course of last summer's excavations that a novel and somewhat shocking thought began to take form in Riggs' mind.

"Assuming that all the evidence is viable and that there really were Pleistocene Basques here 60,000 years ago ... that means they simply could not have come across the Bering land bridge, because the Bering corridor didn't open up until 50,000 years ago."

How, then, did they come to be here? Chewing thoughtfully on a sprig of cheat grass, Riggs gazed out over the eerie landscape of the Owyhee Mountains. "What if these people actually migrated back into Eurasia over that bridge, but were here in the New World long before the Proto-Paleolithic? What if so many Basques came to this area in the early 20th century because they were answering the call of some primeval homing instinct?"

When reminded that the figurine had been carved from an Old World stone, indicating a migration opposite to what he had suggested, Riggs grimaced. "Oh yes ... I forgot about that."

Dr. Riggs will be back to the excavation site this May, and likely many Mays to come. Before he had to abandon the work last September, his students had cleaned off a small arc of a slab of fire-hardened cottonwood, about 22-centimeters thick and extensively worn on the outer rim. Riggs is eager to find what is at the center of that cottonwood disc. Evidence of an ancient axle, perhaps?

"You have to think that if these people could have had botas that long ago, why not the wheel?"

One more intriguing question among many. And the world awaits answers. In the meantime, Ybargoitia has had another well drilled and no longer has to worry about his "girls" getting water during the dry times. "I was there for every inch they went down, sort of wishing they'd pull up something else, and sort of wishing they wouldn't ... if you know what I mean."

The Nampa Image

The figure discovered on Domingo Ybargoitia's Owyhee sheep ranch is not the first puzzling artifact to come from deep beneath the Idaho surface, nor is it the most mysterious. In the summer of 1889, one H. Grumbling and an assistant were drilling a well near Nampa--at the time, a mere village of 347 people--when it appears they brought up what would prove to be a source of controversy for the next 100-plus years. A local man, M.A. Kurtz, was feeling through the slurry being dredged up by a steam-powered sand pump when he found a one-and-one-half-inch-long relic, fashioned from clay. The hands and feet had broken off, along with most of the right leg, but it was clearly a human figure.

The most remarkable thing about it, though, was the depth from which it came. The digging apparatus at the end of the shaft had reached 320 feet down, below many layers of sand, clay and rock, when it appeared. Coming from that level, the relic would have had to be 1.5 million years old by modern dating standards--1.3 million years older than the earliest sapient humans.

In short order, the relic gained national attention with noted figures at odds over what the find meant. A prominent geologist of the day, G. Frederick Wright (who, for a time, was in possession of the artifact), saw it as proof that Darwin was wrong and the Bible was right. Professor Frederic Putman, curator of the Peabody Museum in Boston, regarded it as evidence of "the great antiquity of man in America," as an ally wrote. John Wesley Powell, a geologist and adventurer, was convinced it was a hoax, despite the fact that several respected early Nampans were present at the time it was found, and they presented sworn testimony that it could not have been planted in any way.

Today, the "Nampa Image," as it came to be known, is only one of the many aberrant curiosities Young Earth theorists use to argue their case. The artifact lies at rest in the basement of the Idaho Historical Museum in Julia Davis Park, locked away from public view. No definitive or convincing explanation for either its existence or discovery has ever been found.

--Dr. Roberta T. Axidea

Dr. Roberta T. Axidea teaches Comparative Linguistics at Eastern Washington State University. This article appeared originally in the Euskal Herria Journal of Science.

HansLune: Well isn't that a well written piece of April 1st nonsense! LOL
 
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(Tragically, Sir Smythe-Peebles didn't live long enough to learn of the results. He fell off a skywalk in Spokane in March 2006 in an attempt to get away from a former student who was stalking him because she was convinced he was really the actor John Cleese.)

amazing :shock:
 
What a fascinating read, it was so amazing that when I got to the Cleese part I checked the date on the original article to see if it was from the 1st of April. A great rest from some hardcore spring cleaning, one to watch I'm sure :D 8)
 
The name was the first tip off, T. AXIDEA

Taxidea is the name for the American Badger
 
Hanslune said:
The name was the first tip off, T. AXIDEA

Taxidea is the name for the American Badger
I'd have read it as "Tax Idea", fwiw! :D
 
Notice how Medieval the doll looks:

Feature_figurine.jpg


And of course, humans wore berets 60,000 years ago... :roll:

It's really daft, but it looks like it's spreading across the internet via blogs at quite a speed. Google the bloke's surname and you'll see what I mean.
 
without commenting on whether this is a hoax or not- the finding of mtDNA of basque origin in ancient specimens is hardly surprising considering how they were handled by someone modern of Basque origin!
 
Well, yes, but it's an amazingly well-executed pastiche of a real report. The first time I read it, I was skimming at work and internally screaming: "Domestic sheep?!? What the-? Who did those carbon dates?" After all, there are no limits to how weird reality can get or how far a paradigm can shift; plus there's always time travel. Only on the slower read-through did I get it.

It's well-done to the point of irresponsibility, but my guess is that it's much more obviously funny in the original context, with the jokes about Basques and badgers having the author's neighbors rolling on the floor, and was never expected to escape into the ether. It could easily crop up in future rumor books alongside other newspaper hoaxes, like the pteradactyl in the French subway, reported as solemn truth by more or less honest, but not particularly perceptive, authors.
 
Drought reveals Florida's early inhabitants

Human remains as ancient as one thousand years old have been discovered by chance following a drought in Florida, the Associated Press reported today. People passing by Lake Okeechobee saw the bone fragments as well as pottery and even boats, in the exposed soil of the lake bed. Now archaeologists are keen to get in to examine the artefacts before water levels rise again. ``Right now, it's just a rush to identify things before they go back under water,'' said Chris Davenport, the archaeologist for Palm Beach County. The lake is currently four to five feet below its usual level at about 8.96 feet deep, the shallowest it has been since record keeping began in 1932.

This has revealed a rim of up to a mile and a half wide at some points where bone fragments and pottery have been exposed. ``It looks like it's part of one of the American Indian settlements that were there - people that were intentionally interred at some point,'' said State Archaeologist Ryan Wheeler. The neighbouring Seminole and Miccosukee tribes have been informed of the discoveries, but no decision has yet been made on their fate. No complete skeletons, skulls or other large fragments have been found.

(June 5th)

Charlie Cottrell


http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle ... &amid=5332
 
I just got back from the Gault site in central Texas yesterday. Here's some of the many cool things about it:

A pre-Clovis layer, though so far nothing that can confidently be brought forward to make any particular point.

Two separate Clovis strata, the lower one containing mammoth, horse, camel, and bison antiquus, the upper one with only bison antiquus - evidence that the Clovis technology bracketed the extinction event.

A stone floor with evidence of an adjacent work area and garbage dump; the hunt is on for more of these. Although no conclusion can be drawn, the only analog to this sort of stone floor is Solutrean. (I still don't like the Solutrean hypothesis much, but I won't pretend that my reasons are entirely scientific.) Dr. Wernecke is of the opinion that this floor indicates permanent occupation, on the grounds that you wouldn't haul so much stone for a place where you were only going to be sleeping for a short time, but after camping on the site in the wettest summer on record, I have to disagree. The clay is like wet concrete when saturated and like dried concrete when dry, and there's gobs of usable stone. If my camping companion and I had been limited to use of her tent for our three-day stay, instead of having a nice dry boxcar to retreat to, we would gladly have spent a morning building up a firm surface. We were camped on the top of the escarpment, where the soil is thin above the bedrock and once the ground was saturated there was no place for it to go except up into our sleeping bags. As it was, we hauled a few flat rocks to make a firm path to the front door of the boxcar where our own comings and goings threatened to mire us. We scavenged the spoil pile thrown up by recent construction of a pipe from the cistern to the outdoor showers, and most of them mortared themselves in the first time they were stepped on.

Clear evidence of a permanent manufacturing center (whether continously occupied by the same people or not), with lots of manufacturing debris, practice pieces, and spoiled makings (for many different eras) and lots of used-up pieces, dropped on return to the resource site where replacements were readily available.

Over 10,000 years of occupation. Egypt, eat your heart out.

Neighbors, and former owners, interested in the site and willing to come and lend a hand with the heavy work - of which, believe me, there's plenty!

My own cool moment: I was helping at the screen, retrieving lots of flakes, reduced cores, etc. from the viscous mud (and sinking to my ankles - I had to be physically pulled out, not having sufficient strength in my legs to do it alone) when I looked down and thought: "Hey, I've got a broken point here. No, half a point. Hey, this is a whole point." Before I could speak, my camping companion looked over and said: "That's a point!" I told the student logging things in to put down "Peni saw it first," but I don't know that they did. Anyway, according to Dr. Collins, the head archeologist (and owner of the property) it's an Angostura point cut down from a Clovis point. Angostura postdates Clovis by 3,000 years. This rates an individual write-up, probably one of those very short ones that are monumentally boring unless you're a lithics maven, but - I saw it first. :)

I also found a broken Pedernales point, a mere 3,500 years old, but it was down in the disturbed area where the owners before the last owners used to charge people to destroy their black rock midden full of artifacts that would have told us many things had it been excavated properly. Pedernales is the most common point in Texas, but not at Gault, probably because they got carted off by tourists. I put it back where I got it after finding out what it was, because even in the disturbed area they don't want people strolling off with things. Discipline, you know.

Mostly I hauled heavy things up and down the steep road from the escarpment, the shallow road having suddenly developed a spring from all the heavy rains raising the water table. My feet look like a war zone. And I've decided that, if I kill anybody in the next book, it will be from an infected cut or bug bite.
 
rynner said:
Yes! The very essence of Forteana! There are no facts, only opinions.

Read "What do we mean by Fortean?" in any FT mag.




Sounds like a born "de-bunker" if you ask me.
 
I have no authority to distribute this, but I figure it's like passing around a hard copy for others to read. This is y'all's opportunity to get in on the ground floor! Bolding is mine. The Gault logo on the t-shirts is a Texas flag with a Clovis point in place of the star - very cool, and you'll be the only one on your block.

I drove up to the lab last month and saw some of the "not-Clovis" pieces - they don't say "pre-Clovis," though it's underneath the Clovis strata, because that's bad luck. So far it's all fragmentary and won't move the Clovis Police, but we are going to learn so much from this site!

Gault School News December 2007 No. 1

Welcome to the premier edition of the Gault School of Archaeological
Research Newsletter! I hope to keep our members and other interested
parties informed on Gault School activities quarterly and primarily via
email. If you would rather receive this in hard copy please let me know.

Some of you reading this (and you know who you are) are reading
"complimentary" copies of our newsletter. What does this mean? It means you
have not yet joined the coolest group in Central Texas, those who are
supporting the research and educational activities at Gault. If this is the
case please read down through the newsletter with special attention to our
Mission Statement and information on how to become a member. We would love
to welcome you to the family!

D. Clark Wernecke
Executive Director

**********************************************
Who We Are: Our Mission

The Gault Site, in Central Texas, has offered us a unique opportunity to
learn more about the early prehistory of North America and the origin of
humans in the New World. In excavations since 1998 more than one million
artifacts from an estimated 3 percent of the site have given us a unique
perspective on the Clovis culture. Now the work begun at Gault has entered
a new phase presenting us an opportunity to advance archaeological science
and education in the long term.

The Gault School is a 501(c) 3 research and educational non-profit
administered by a Board of Directors and headed up by Dr. Michael Collins.
The School has obtained the Gault Site as both a resource and base of
operations for the future will include research, archaeological and outdoor
education, and promotion of early man in the Americas studies.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to join us in making
this one of the premier archaeological education facilities in the world.

The Gault School of Archaeological Research was organized to:
" hold maintain & protect property in Bell and Williamson Counties in
Texas on which the Gault Archaeological Site is located.
" conduct further scientific research on the Gault Site.
" foster, develop, research, promote, maintain and encourage the
education of the public about the Gault Site, its environment, and the
prehistory of the site, region and beyond.
" foster, promote and conduct broader archaeological research of the
earliest peoples in the western hemisphere and their cultural antecedents.
" develop and disseminate materials and research related to the above
themes.
" foster collaboration with individuals and organizations with common
interests.


This mission will be accomplished through:
" field schools and fieldwork
" programs in archaeological and outdoor education for students and
the public
" the establishment of both an on-site museum and traveling exhibits
" a scholar-in-residence program and lecture series
" publications and presentations of information by Gault staff
researchers and associates

***********************************************
Meet the Executive Director

For those who don't know me (Nice to meet you!) I'll give you a brief
introduction. I was born and raised in Southeastern Wisconsin ("Historic
Cedarburg, Wisconsin: Historic Grandeur, Enduring Beauty") and got out of
the cold country as soon as I possibly could. I have been interested in
history and archaeology since I was old enough to read so I made my first
move to Dallas and got a B.A. in History from SMU along with my first
courses in archaeology. I also worked on my first site, Tel Batash in
Israel.

One of my professors at the time told me that "if you want to be an
archaeologist get a real job first." He might have been joking but I
couldn't see a way to survive in archaeology at the time so I moved back to
Wisconsin and served time in the family lumber business. I went back to
school and got an MBA at Northwestern University which led to further
opportunities operating lumber and home centers in Florida and, later,
consulting in that industry.

During one of the economic slowdowns one of my friends pointed out that,
given my great interest in archaeology and the fact that I currently had
time on my hands, I might be interested in the archaeological program at
the university less than 1 mile from my house. I ended up going back to
school and received a MA from FAU in Boca Raton. An interesting offer led
me to the field director's job at the BRASS/El Pilar Program in Guatemala
and Belize (still an ongoing research program) where I worked from
1993-2000. I met my wife on this program and we moved to Austin while I
worked on my PhD in Anthropology at UT Austin. In 1999, during the wet
season in Mesoamerica, I found myself volunteering to excavate at the Gault
Site (my wife wanted me out of the house) and in 2000 I joined the Gault
Project as Project Director.

*************************************************
The Gault Site

The question I'm asked a lot lately is "What is going on at the Site?" The
short answer is lots! The 32+ acre Lindsey tract that many of you are
familiar with was acquired in February of 2007 along with the tract of land
west of it abutting the highway (40 acres) which included a house and some
outbuildings. The real scramble came in that the Society for American
Archaeology's Annual Meeting was in Austin in April and we had arranged for
a tour of the site. Luckily Dr. Bruce Bradley and a group of students from
the University of Exeter (UK) came to our rescue and helped us excavate two
units to expose stratigraphy. They worked in some of the most miserable
weather we have ever had at the site - the constant grey rainy March we had
- and one commented that had they known it would be like this they could
have gotten the same weather at home! The sold-out tour for the SAA was a
great success and our colleagues were very impressed at the amount of work
the project has done.

In June we were joined by the first of many summer field schools by
Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute. The field school, led by Joe Yedlowski
and Judith Thomas, combines both prehistoric and historic components. Joe
is heading up the prehistoric work and they are excavating in an area to
the northeast of Bcat 18 (the stone floor) at Gault. Judith's group is
excavating the whitehead homestead, a circa 1870 site in Williamson County.
The MAI group plans to spend two months each year visiting the Gault Site.

Our friend Skip Lohse (not to be confused with Jon) from Idaho State
University brought a group of students in July for a short excavation
looking for intact Archaic deposits at Gault.

Next year we already have MAI scheduled as well as a group from New
Hampshire led by Dick Boisvert. The New Hampshire State Conservation and
Rescue Archaeology Program (SCRAP) have visited Gault many times in the
past and the "Hamster Pit" was affectionately named after them. We look
forward to their return. We're also hosting the field portion of the TAS
Archaeology Academy 101 session to be held in Belton February 8-10.

************************************
The Gault Project

The short answer is, yes, we are once again excavating at the Gault Site.
In past excavation in the North Pasture we found intriguing amounts of
lithic debitage below the known Clovis strata. In order to get a better
look at this we have started a 4 X 7 meter hole that will step down until
we reach our goal 3+ meters down. The Gault Project crew is going to try
(between other obligations) to excavate on Tuesdays and Thursday during the
week while Cinda Timperley, our staff paleontologist and volunteer
coordinator, is leading groups of volunteers excavating on Saturdays. If
you are interested in volunteering contact Cinda at
[email protected] or via our office at 512-471-5982.

The Project staff also continues to struggle with the Gault monograph which
has come a long way. I get a lot of questions regarding our progress and
always want to remind everyone that only one member of our staff is
full-time and there are in excess of 1.2 Million artifacts
. The going may
be slow but it has been very fruitful - we are learning a great deal about
the Clovis culture.

There were two highly successful symposia at the SAA Annual Meeting (a
speaking and a poster session) on the Gault Site getting the information
gleaned to date out to our professional colleagues. Professional articles
appeared in the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society and
Archaeological Prospection and a book chapter by Dr. Collins (see below).
In March National Geographic ran the episode of Naked Science (Prehistoric
Americans) that features Gault and reconstructions we filmed in August of
2006.

Collins, M.
2007 Discerning Clovis Subsistence From Stone Artifacts and Site
Distributions on the Southern Plains Periphery. In Foragers of the Terminal
Pleistocene in North America, edited by R. Walker and B. Driskell, pp.
59-87. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.
Collins, M., J. C. Lohse, and M. B. Shoberg 2007 The de Graffenried
Collection: A Clovis Biface Cache from the Gault Site, Central Texas.
Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 78:101-123.
Hildebrand, J. A., S. M. Wiggins, J. L. Driver and M. R. Waters 2007 Rapid
seismic reflection imaging at the Clovis period Gault site in central
Texas. Archaeological Prospection 14(4):245-260.

***************************************************
Physical Plant

In order to accommodate our friends from Exeter and future projects the 2
bedroom house next to the entrance road was completely remodeled. It had
bug and water damage issues so much of it needed to be reduced to a
skeleton and completely rebuilt. Thanks to the tireless efforts of a group
of volunteers (a special thanks to the Taggart's and Ricky Lindsey) we
managed to have it livable by the time Bradley et al. came. Work is still
ongoing but now we are down to some needed electrical work and cosmetic
details.

Recently the small white shed next to the house has been cleaned and
emptied in readiness for a remodeling to make it into a workshop and
storage facility.

The steel barn above the site has been transformed into a field lab
complete with equipment storage, drying racks and an analysis area. MAI was
the first to use this new lab and pronounced it GREAT!

MAI also provided us with our two newest facilities. The north pasture has
two 30 X 50' stressed skin buildings in it. The buildings, a little like
large canvas Quonset huts, cover the excavations underway by the Gault
Project and the MAI field school enabling us to work year round in all
types of weather. We REALLY would like to thank our friends at Mercyhurst
for these!

****************************************************
Website

The Gault School has a new website at www.gaultschool.org. We have put up
a temporary site with information and some links and expect to expand on
that beginning soon. In the future I hope to have copies of this newsletter
online along with photos of ongoing work.

*****************************************************
Membership

For those of you who are already members, thank you! For those of you
receiving a Complimentary copy of this newsletter (and you know who you
are) memberships in the GSAR are as follows:

Student - $10.00
Adult Individuals - $45.00
Dual/Family - $65.00
Organizations/Institutions - $500.00
Corporations - $1000.00

Checks can be made out to the "Gault School of Archaeological Research" and
sent to our office at 5000 Burnet Road Austin, TX 78756

Currently the benefits of membership are, first and foremost, helping the
Gault School reach its research and educational goals. You also will get
this newsletter quarterly and are entitled to a 10% discount on Gault
Project T-shirts (If you haven't seen them they are grey with the Gault
Project flag logo on the chest and yours for only $13.50 each). We also
hope to implement shortly a distinguished speaker series featuring some of
the many professional friends and colleagues of Gault.

We welcome you to join us in supporting the Gault School!

****************************************************************
Donations

Donations to the Gault School are not only greatly appreciated and
acknowledged but are also tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Monetary donations are always welcome as volunteers. The GSAR is also in
need of non-monetary donations of everything from equipment to electrical
work. If you are able to help or have something to donate you think we
could use please contact Clark Wernecke at [email protected] or
512-471-5982. A sample of our current needs includes:

Site
Gravel for roads and culvert
Automatic gate for pasture
2 500 gal water tanks
2 water towers
Sump system for north pasture
Plywood for excavation area
Closet doors and shelves for house
Incinerator toilet


Equipment
Laser level
Photographic lights and equipment
Excavation equipment
First Aid/Safety gear
Radio communications system
Wet screens
 
Faeces hint at first Americans

Fossilised faeces found in a US cave may help solve the riddle of when and how humans came to the Americas.

The samples date back just over 14,000 years, before the time of the Clovis culture.

Clovis people dominated North and Central America around 13,000 years ago, and whether any groups came before them has been controversial.


In the journal Science, the researchers describe how their conclusion hinged on modern genetic analysis.

The 14 faecal fragments were discovered in caves near a lake in the north-western US state of Oregon, among other signs of ancient human occupation.

These included threads made from animal sinew and plant fibre, baskets, animal hides and wooden pegs.

The presence of these artefacts at various depths in the cave floor indicated it was populated for extensive periods - but by whom?

"We found a little pit in the bottom of a cave," related Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, whose team excavated the Paisley Caves in 2002 and 2003.

"It was full of camel, horse and mountain sheep bones, and in there we found a human coprolite."

'Convincing evidence'

This and 13 other coprolites - fossilised faeces - proved the star attraction, because they contained tiny quantities of human mitochondrial DNA - genetic material found outside the nuclei of cells which is passed down from each mother to her children.

Several kinds of genetic analysis performed at several different laboratories confirmed that the DNA was human, and suggested the ancient cave residents were closely related to ethnic groups indigenous to Siberia and East Asia.

This adds to other strands of evidence suggesting that the Americas were settled from Siberia - and the age of the samples indicates the migration happened before the emergence of the Clovis culture with its distinctive fluted stone blades.

"If this doesn't convince what's left of the 'Clovis first' people, it should," University of California scholar David Smith, who was not involved in the study, told Science journal.

In an era when the north of the Americas were heavily glaciated, the question then is: how did the pre-Clovis people make the journey?

"The first humans either had to walk or sail along the American west coast to get around the ice cap," contended Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Copenhagen University, who led the DNA work on the new study.

"That is, unless they arrived so long before the last ice age that the land passage wasn't yet blocked by ice."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7329505.stm
 
"If this doesn't convince what's left of the 'Clovis first' people, it should," University of California scholar David Smith, who was not involved in the study, told Science journal.

Yeah, well, so should Monte Verde have. So should Meadowcroft. Some people, naming no names, appear to have reached a point at which their brains can no longer modify to accept this specific new information and will continually concoct excuses not to have to. I will be interested to see how the dating is supposed to be screwed up here.

Stuff keeps preventing me from getting back out to the site. :( They could be finding all kinds of stuff without me!
 
Still haven't heard any backlash. Early days yet.

All the same, it's a good year for "my" Asian boat people. (I take a proprietary interest in the coastal migration theory because I evolved it independently early in my research, when I kept wondering why the need to walk to America was so consistently assumed by the authors of the papers available to me at that time.) In addition to the Oregon coprolites, my April Mammoth Trumpet has an article titled "Largest-ever Survey of Native American Genes Sheds Light on First Americans." Without going into technicalities, the gradients of decreasing diversity in modern populations support both the Siberian origin of Americans and their tendency to populate the coasts before the interior. The data also indicate a single migration, not successive waves. This is interesting to me since it's so easy to fit modern physical, ethnographic, and linguistic traits into a three-migration pattern, but that's not mentioned in the article and any conclusions I drew would rapidly exceed my understanding of the data. No support was found for recent preColumbian contacts such as Prince Madoc's supposed colony, but of course this only shows that they didn't interbreed with surviving nations much if they existed at all.

The admitted weaknesses of the study are that, despite the large and diverse sample size, certain regions are still sketchily represented or not represented at all; and that it could not by its nature deal with populations that left no modern descendents. Fossil DNA has already disclosed a previously unknown genetic group living in Canada 5,000 BP. Interesting monkey wrenches could still be thrown into this work either by access to ancient DNA or by studies from the unsampled or undersampled groups - Alaska, western US and Canada, southeastern North America (an extremely interesting area in light of Cactus Hill and the Florida sinkhole), and eastern South America. The last two regions are where, if anywhere, the Solutrean Hypothesis will be tested hardest, so I think studies there are of considerable importance.
 
I've read that there is evidence of very ancient occupation of the Americas (perhaps as far as 40,000 years ago) and that the first people who lived there were closer to Australian Aboriginals than to modern Native Americans. DNA evidence from indigenous people living in Tierra del Fuego also indicates a link with Australians. I'd be interested in your views PeniG - it's an area I find fascinating.
 
I go on and on and on about this and related matters on my Pleistocene expansion page, if you really want to know what I think in detail.
http://users.idworld.net/griffin/iceage.htm

Essentially I'm agnostic with leanings toward Asian boat people coming along the coasts as the very first Americans. I think if Solutreans came here, they spent their winters along the Atlantic ice rim living a life not unlike modern Arctic peoples' and summered alternately on the east coast of North America and the west coast of Europe. I also think there were people we could call Beringians for a long time and that it's more nearly correct to speak of people coming "from" Beringia than "from" Asia proper.

The 40,000 BP data are very tentative so far. Physical data are from controversial contexts, like a much less well-preserved and studied layer below Monte Verde and the Mexican fossil footprints. Some genetic data support this deep-time theory as well, but depend on certain assumptions about rates of mutation that may or may not prove valid in the long run. The possibility is exciting and we have barely begun to explore it; IMHO the impetus and the practical work will come more out of South than from North America.

All descriptions of skeletal remains described in terms of modern races should be taken with a grain of salt and I wish people wouldn't do it, as it gets the general public excited about the wrong things. Modern races are relatively modern developments and even with modern races, forensic identification of race is problematic, with bones of crime or disaster victims being labeled with the "wrong" race part of the time. The "Australian looking" or "Polynesian looking" or "Negroid" bones belong to "Luzia," a woman's skull from Brazil dated at around 12,500 BP. You can tell by the number of ethnicities Luzia's been given just how tenuous racial identification of such old bones is!

You can see Luzia's skull here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10441210
And a facial reconstruction here (I recommend this entire site, but it's huge; for our purposes here, the argument that the modern Andaman resemble the original population out of Africa more closely than other modern populations is the most interesting part):
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter54/text-LagoaSanta/text-LagoaSanta.htm#Luzia

The thing about being "from" the Southern Pacific or Australia is that, ultimately, we all came from Africa. If (for example) a base population reaches southeast Asia and then divides into two populations, one going north and one going south, then the descendents of those two populations will share features that belonged to the parent population. If the northbound group winds up coasting around Beringia and working its way down the west coast of the Americas, then striking inland; while the southbound group reaches Australia by a similar coastal route and then abandons boating technology, it should not surprise us that their descendents resemble each other - but we can no more call the Brazilian branch of the family Australian than we can call the Australian branch Brazilian.

Similarly, the "Caucasoid" suite of traits originated in central Eurasia and we know for a fact that people with those traits - the Jomona or Ainu - made it all the way to Japan, where they still form an ethnic minority. Therefore, the Solutrean settlers are not necessary to explain the "Caucasoid" traits of skeletons like Kennewick Man and less famous skeletons, like Wilson-Lenard. The few Paleoamerican skulls we have do not resemble any modern population precisely, but they resemble the Jomona more than most.

Bear in mind that the number of human skeletons we have in America from even the late Ice Age is miniscule compared to the same time frame in Europe. This is readily accounted for if we presume that European cultures were more likely to bury their dead and Americans were more likely to expose them; it may also be due to differences in preservation conditions and in archaelogical techniques. We have had a prejudice against the possibility of deep-time Americans for a long, long time here; pretty much since we've had archeology.

Theories of world population suffer from the same tendency to oversimplification and illusions of intention that theories of evolution have always had to contend with. The way I reckon it, nobody set out and said: "Let's go discover America. Let's discover Australia. Let's populate the world." Our ancesotors were just like us. They moved around for short-term reasons, married according to rules that made sense for their societies, broke those rules when they had sufficient personal motive to do so, explored out of curiosity and necessity, stayed where they were comfortable, went back to the place their grandparents talked about when the tsunami made the coast a place of horror, followed the fish or the bison or the seals or the cycles of the plants on a seasonal basis, changed their ways when conditions changed, married and intermarried and fought and conquered and were driven into exile - just like we've been doing ever since. Why shouldn't a single migration event across the Bering Strait include a clan which, for whatever reason, included members with genetic links to modern Jomona, Australian, and Mongoloid people? We're all related if you go back far enough, and AFAIK the principle of six degrees of separation has operated for a long, long time.
 
"My" site in Scientific American! I'll post the whole text, but follow the link and see the slideshow anyhow. No, I'm not in any of the pictures; they predate my involvement. (Stupid day job. Don't miss it.) This is a very conservative description of this site and doesn't even mention the engravings, the apparent practice-pieces, the signs of reuse and interaction with the landscape over time...That second engraved stone, btw, the one the slideshow calls "mysterious?" Dr. Wernecke, who is 2nd in command after Collins, thinks it depicts plants.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tex ... ogical-dig
Texas Archaeological Dig Challenges Assumptions about First Americans

FLORENCE, TEX.—"Look at that—isn't it gorgeous?" Sandy Peck asks as she rinses dirt from a flaked stone about the length and width of a pinky finger. Peck runs a hose over soil on a fine-mesh screen, prodding at stubborn clods of clay with a muddy glove. "Look, there's another one."

Peck, sorting soil that had been disturbed by a recent thunderstorm, is a volunteer looking for artifacts in the Gault Valley in central Texas, some 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of Austin. The valley hasn't changed much over the last several thousand years: A spring-fed creek still runs among live oaks and pecan trees, jackrabbits and deer still live on the nearby uplands, and cobbles of chert, ideal for making stone tools, still bulge from the valley's limestone walls. Today, however, instead of working hides and shaping stones as they did 13,000 years ago, humans painstakingly sift the soil in search of ancient artifacts that will overturn long-held assumptions about the earliest Americans.

Since the 1930s textbooks have taught that the New World's first inhabitants, known for the town in New Mexico where their spear points were discovered, walked from Siberia to Alaska about 13,300 years ago. The Clovis people were believed to be highly mobile nomadic hunters, never settling in one place, instead surviving on massive mammoths, mastodons and ancient bison.

But in excavations starting in 1998 Gault has revealed that Clovis people lived at the site for extended periods over a span of 300 years, says Michael Collins, a research associate with the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory. The evidence? Scientists have found numerous tools manufactured from local stone, used until they were worn, then repaired repeatedly until they finally were discarded. In other words, Paleo-Indians were members of a settled community. "We're redefining Clovis," Collins says.

It's unusual to find a site that has both materials for stone tools and "enough resources that people could camp and live right there," says Dennis Stanford, head of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History anthropology department who has visited the Gault site several times. "Usually you don't get both, but at Gault you get the whole show. So it looks like people were living there for extended periods of time."

Gault also suggests previous assumptions about Clovis's diet were wrong. Sure, they ate mammoth and bison, but archaeologists are also finding bones from frogs, turtles, snakes and rabbits. "Coming home with three rabbits isn't as dramatic as the museum mural image of Clovis people sneaking up on a mammoth," says Collins's colleague, Andy Hemmings, but probably better reflects day-to-day life.

Not everyone is convinced that Clovis was such a homebody. "Gault is not completely rewriting what we know about Clovis," says Robert L. Kelly, head of the department of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. "[Collins] could be right that this particular population of Clovis was more settled than other peoples. But is Gault the pattern or is Gault an aberration? We don't know."

The Clovis finds would be dramatic enough, but Collins also claims to have found evidence of an earlier culture at Gault. In 2002 the team dug below Clovis layers and promptly found hundreds of stone flakes. The surrounding soil was dated to 350 years before Clovis. When they kept digging, the team dated other materials to even further back, although Collins used a technique that others have questioned, and that even he acknowledges is imprecise.

If it holds up, Collins's claim would add Gault to the list of proposed pre-Clovis sites, including Monte Verde in Chile, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania and Cactus Hill in Virginia. They're all controversial, however, based on charges of contamination and other problems.

Collins hopes to bolster his case by digging further at Gault. He'll also use another method to test the soil's age. And some 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from Gault, in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, members of his team will soon tackle the perplexing question of how Paleo-Indians got here in the first place. Until an ice-free corridor opened in northwestern Canada about 13,300 years ago, providing a route to the interior, a dome of ice divided Asia from North America. Some archaeologists have proposed an ice-free route along the northwestern coast; others suggest the first Americans, like the first Australians, had boats and used them either to travel east from Asia or, a few daring archaeologists propose, west from Europe. Hard evidence is unavailable because the coastline moved several hundreds of meters inland when the ice sheets melted.

"The archaeological record is out there underwater," says Hemmings, "so that's the next frontier in this search." Hemmings plans to spend two weeks this summer in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico looking for Clovis and pre-Clovis sites. In an expedition funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a team lead by Hemmings and James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., will explore promising sites along ancient coastlines using remotely operated vehicles. They've identified prime targets by studying underwater maps for features Clovis people are known to have preferred, such as cliff faces near streams or rivers.

Back on dry land, Collins believes Gault has more to tell us about early Americans. "It's a special place," says Collins, "and it's been a special place for a long, long time."
 
"Fort" Actually Ancient Aqueduct

There’s a Native American site in Ohio that appeared to be a fort. But recent discoveries by archaeologists at the University of Cincinnati show that’s not the case. Instead, it’s a two-thousand year old Shawnee water management system. It stretches out almost six kilometers. That’s much larger than what had been thought to comprise the so-called fort. It’s one of the largest such sites in the country.

What had been thought to be gates for military protection are actually a series of dams and irrigation canals. There are logs and clay bricks for damming; raceways for flowing water originate in far-off springs. The water was stored and channeled for irrigation. Drill cores show water sediments and clay.

The site demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of engineering—which archaeologists did not realize that Native American communities might have. The site also reveals an emphasis on public works, rather than on war. So this discovery might rewrite a bit of history. Another interesting note: Shawnee remains from the time are typically of petite, graceful men—and robust, muscular women. So it was probably the women who built the water system. Which means even more history to rewrite.

—Cynthia Graber

Fort
 
Full text at link.

No burial for 10,000-year-old bones
University of California denies request for repatriation of remains.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081029/ ... 1156a.html
Rex Dalton

California's Kumeyaay tribes are fighting to reclaim the skeletons.In the latest twist in the tug-of-war between Native Americans and anthropologists, officials at the University of California have decided not to repatriate a pair of well-preserved skeletons that are nearly 10,000 years old.

Archaeology students unearthed the bones in 1976 near the clifftop home of the chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). It may be possible to extract some of the oldest human DNA in North America from the exquisitely preserved remains, say researchers. But in the past two years the bones have become a political football over US$7-million plans to demolish and rebuild the house.

A group of 13 local bands, known as the Kumeyaay tribes, argued that the site was a sacred burial site, and that the bones found there should be repatriated to them. In March this year, UCSD dropped plans to knock down the house, opting instead for a renovation. But last week, University of California officials notified federal authorities that the bones could not be proved to be culturally affiliated with the Kumeyaay and thus would not be returned.

Steve Banegas, a tribal spokesman for the Kumeyaay, says they hadn't been notified of the decision. "They are our relatives," he says. "We want them reburied. They should stop playing politics with the remains."

The dispute reflects the increasingly acrimonious debate over decisions involving ancient skeletons. In 2004, a federal court ruled that the roughly 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man skeleton, found in a riverbank in Washington state, should not be returned to local tribes that could not prove cultural affiliation. In other cases, usually involving younger bones, museums have returned specimens when they were shown to be culturally affiliated to local tribes.

In San Diego, tribes newly enriched by casino earnings have enlisted powerful state legislators to their cause. Facing such pressure, University of California officials are reviewing the 10-campus university's policy on how cultural affiliation is determined.
 
Published online 8 January 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.7

Earliest Americans took two paths
Genetic analysis suggests there were at least two migrations into the Americas.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090108/ ... 009.7.html

by Heidi Ledford


Did Native Americans take different paths into the Americas?Steve Bly / AlamyThe ancestors of Native Americans took at least two different paths into the Americas, a new genetic analysis suggests. Although both groups travelled across the Bering land bridge, which connected Asia and North America during the last ice age, the migrants later took divergent paths: one along the Pacific coast, and the other following a route that lead them east of the Rocky Mountains.

The new results counter the notion, recently growing in popularity and support, that the first Americans derived from a single founder population that moved along the deglaciated Pacific coast.

For example, a recent analysis of genetic markers in 422 Native Americans from across the Americas concluded that there was probably only a single major migration into the region1. And another study found that all Native Americans share a unique genetic marker that is not present in other lineages, suggesting that Native Americans derived from a single, distinct founder population2.

Geneticist Antonio Torroni, of the University of Pavia in Italy, says he also subscribed to that hypothesis. But then he and his collaborators analysed full genome sequences from mitochondria — energy-producing structures in the cell that carry their own, maternally-inherited genetic information. "We started to get data at a higher resolution," he says, "and then we began to see things that were not visible before."

The rare lineages
Torroni and his colleagues looked at 69 mitochondrial genome sequences, most of which came from members of two rare Native American lineages, called D4h3 and X2a. They compared these sequences with published sequences from other Native American populations and, based on the accumulation of changes in the DNA sequences, concluded that most had existed as distinct groups since about 15,000–17,000 years ago, close to the expected arrival date of the first Americans.

The researchers also looked at where members of the two genetic lines are found. D4h3 members are found along the Pacific coast — a 10,300-year-old skeleton found in Alaska has also been identified as part of this group. But X2a is found only in northern North America, and no samples were obtained south of the United States. Most X2a samples were found near the Great Lakes.

That distribution, says Torroni, suggests that there were two separate migrations into the Americas: a large migration along the Pacific coast and an inland route along a corridor formed between two ice sheets. The results are published this week in Current Biology3.

The finding could change our theories of how culture, technology and language developed in the New World, he says. "Our data raise the possibility that, at the time of entry, the first Americans might have spoken languages already differentiated, and possibly belonging to more than one language family," he says. "This is a very heated issue among linguists."

Divided by chance
The work makes an important contribution to the field, says Brian Kemp, a molecular anthropologist at Washington State University in Pullman. "This is work I dreamed of doing," he says. But although Kemp acknowledges that there might have been multiple migrations from a single population, he remains unconvinced that the earliest Americans derived from separate populations with unique genetics and cultures.

Instead, the distribution patterns we see today may have been shaped by chance. "All indications suggest that a relatively small group that occupied two entirely empty continents expanded very rapidly," he says. "The chance that we would have lost lineages in the first few years is, I think, relatively high." And the results do not explain the presence of D4h3 in an ancient burial ground found in Illinois, he notes. "It's the one outlier, but it still needs an explanation," he says.

Meanwhile, Torroni hopes that future analysis will allow researchers to dissect additional American lineages and to study their geographic distribution as well. "We expect that some of these sub-branches will have distributions paralleling those that we have observed in the current study," he says, "while others may reveal still unknown migratory events."

References
Wang, S. et al. PLoS Genet. 3, e185 (2007). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
Schroeder, K. B. et al. Biol. Lett. 3, 218–223 (2007).
Perego, U. A. et al. Curr. Biol. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.058 (2008).
 
‘Stonehenge’ At The Bottom Of Lake Michigan

STONEHENGE BENEATH THE WATERS OF LAKE MICHIGAN

[Image: Standing stones beneath Lake Michigan? View larger].

In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University College, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan.
If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.

[Image: The stones beneath Lake Michigan; view larger].

In a PDF assembled by Holley and Brian Abbott to document the expedition, we learn that the archaeologists had been hired to survey a series of old boatwrecks using a slightly repurposed "sector scan sonar" device. You can read about the actual equipment – a Kongsberg-Mesotech MS 1000 – here.
The circular images this thing produces are unreal; like some strange new art-historical branch of landscape representation, they form cryptic dioramas of long-lost wreckage on the lakebed. Shipwrecks (like the Tramp, which went down in 1974); a "junk pile" of old boats and cars; a Civil War-era pier; and even an old buggy are just some of the topographic features the divers discovered.
These are anthropological remains that will soon be part of the lake's geology; they are our future trace fossils.
But down amongst those otherwise mundane human remains were the stones.

[Image: The "junk pile" of old cars and boat skeletons; view larger].

While there is obviously some doubt as to whether or not that really is a mastodon carved on a rock – let alone if it really was human activity that arranged some of the rocks into a Stonehenge-like circle – it's worth pointing out that Michigan does already have petroglyph sites and even standing stones.
A representative of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology has even commented that, although he's skeptical, he's interested in learning more, hoping to see better photographs of the so-called "glyph stone."

[Image: The stones; view larger].

So is there a North American version of Stonehenge just sitting up there beneath the glacial waters of a small northern bay in Lake Michigan? If so, are there other submerged prehistoric megaliths waiting to be discovered by some rogue archaeologist armed with a sonar scanner?
Whatever the answer might be, the very suggestion is interesting enough to think about – where underwater archaeology, prehistoric remains, and lost shipwrecks collide to form a midwestern mystery: National Treasure 3 or Da Vinci Code 2. Even Ghostbusters: The Return.
But only future scuba expeditions will be able to tell for sure.

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