Signs of an earlier American

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ONCE AGAIN EVIDENCE IS CONFIRMING THE TRADITIONAL VIEW HELD BY

AMERICAN INDAINS RATHER THAN THE ACADEMIC VIEW HELD BY MAINSTREAM

SCIENCE.

Signs of an earlier American

 

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

 

Al Goodyear is holding his breath in anticipation. Within days, the

affable archaeologist expects to read the results of lab tests

indicating that stone tools he recently found in South Carolina are

25,000 years old - or older.

Such results would be explosive. They would imply that humans lived

on this continent before the last ice age, far earlier than

previously believed. Even if the dates came in younger than 25,000

years old, researchers say, the find would add to the mounting body

of evidence that humans trod North and South America at least 2,000

years before the earliest-known inhabitants, known as the Clovis

culture.

 

 

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0923/csmimg/p14a.jpg

DIGGING DEEPER: At the Topper site in South Carolina, artifacts

have been found more than six feet below the level of the Clovis,

thought to be the first Americans.

DARYL P. MILLER/ UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Dr. Goodyear's efforts are among the latest from a growing group of

archaeologists and anthropologists who have become emboldened to

buck conventional wisdom and probe far deeper into the hemisphere's

past than many of their predecessors did. What they are finding not

only could rewrite old chapters in the history of two continents, it

could write new ones.

 

"With all these new discoveries, it's almost a rebirth of excitement

in the field. All sorts of new ideas are coming forward about

migration routes and timing of arrival," says Michael Waters, a

geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University who is involved in several

pre-Clovis digs around the United States. "You still have to be

careful. Every claim of pre-Clovis occupation needs to be looked at

quite carefully."

 

And they are. When stunning discoveries surface in North America's

paleolithic past, they can ignite debates conducted with all the

gentility of the Stanley Cup finals - as Goodyear knows.

 

"When these dates come back, I'll be hiding in a coal mine. I've

already got a little Groucho Marx disguise I'm going to put on,"

quips the University of South Carolina scientist, who along with

colleagues is working what's called the Topper site in Allendale

County, S.C., along the Savannah River.

 

For decades, the Clovis culture has held sway as the oldest in the

New World. Evidence for this group's presence was first unearthed in

1936 near Clovis, N.M. A second site that emerged in Arizona in

1959, and others since. A uniquely fluted spear point became the

culture's icon. Radiocarbon dating at Clovis sites so far has

bracketed their presence from roughly 11,200 to around 10,800

radiocarbon years ago. (Archaeologists prefer expressing dates in

radiocarbon years because converting to modern calendar years

becomes tricky beyond a certain age threshold.)

 

Searching for Big Foot

 

As evidence for the Clovis culture's presence cropped up throughout

the continent and the sites became the subject of intense study, the

notion that Clovis people were the oldest immigrants to the Western

Hemisphere became firmly entrenched. Although some research teams

periodically claimed to have found older sites, their evidence was

shaky or later proved to have a less radical explanation. To claim a

pre-Clovis find was akin to claiming to spot Big Foot.

 

Researchers often hesitated "to dig below the Clovis horizon for

fear of ridicule," Dr. Waters says.

 

By many accounts, the turning point came seven years ago when

anthropologist Tom Dillehay published the second of two encyclopedic

volumes of results from a site in southern Chile known as Monte

Verde. His team's evidence pointed to a human presence there 13,000

years ago. Other sites began to appear with evidence for pre-Clovis

occupation that many saw as more credible than evidence from earlier

efforts.

 

One of these sites, known as Mud Lake, sits near Kenosha, Wis. It

was discovered by accident in January 1936, the same year as the

first find of a Clovis point, when a Works Progress Administration

crew was digging a drainage ditch and unearthed most of a foreleg

from a juvenile mammoth. Turned over to the Kenosha Historical

Society, it sat there until 1990, when an amateur archaeologist

noted cut marks on the bones. Bones from nearby sites, known as the

Fenske and Shaefer sites, showed similar markings. In 1992 and 1993,

researchers excavated Shaefer and found bones with cut marks on them

and stone tools underneath a pelvis bone. Radiocarbon dates on the

bones and on plant material at the same level of the dig ranged from

12,500 to 12,300 years ago, nudging them beyond the Clovis time

scale.

 

Dates from the Mud Lake bone were more stunning, says Dan Joyce,

senior curator at the Kenosha Public Museum. Purported hunters slew

the mammoth 13,450 years ago. He remains cautious about the presence

of hunters. Cut marks are suggestive, but not conclusive. This past

August, he and his team searched for the rest of their mammoth. But

so far it has remained elusive enough to earn the beast the

sobriquet Waldo, after the children's "Where's Waldo?" series.

 

While Dr. Joyce and his colleagues were planning their hunt for

Waldo, Goodyear was taking a deeper look at Topper, a site he had

been studying for 20 years. An adherent to the Clovis-first idea, he

began to rethink his position after reading a site report from

Cactus Hill, a pre-Clovis site in Virginia, in 1998.

 

His subsequent work at Topper uncovered what looked to be industrial-

scale toolmaking well below the level at which Clovis artifacts were

found. With no organic material available to radiocarbon-date the

level, the team had to use a different technique that stunned them

with date estimates of 16,000 to 20,000 years ago.

 

In May, he took his crew back to Topper for another, deeper look.

They found what they interpret as tools in a layer roughly two

meters (6.5 feet) below their earlier pre-Clovis finds. The soils

and geology suggest that the artifacts are several thousand years

older, he says. But nothing beats radiocarbon dates. Fortuitously,

they found a sample of wood charcoal to derive three radiocarbon

dates.

 

"I'd be very surprised if they're less than 25,000 years old, but

I'm preparing myself mentally for the possibility that they could be

a lot older," perhaps as old as 30,000 or 40,000 years, he says.

 

Such finds raise intriguing questions. Clovis groups were thought to

have crossed a broad land bridge across the Bering Strait, hiking

through breaks in the glaciers to what is now the lower 48. But if

people lived on the continent at least 2,000 years earlier, they

would have arrived at a time when the glaciers were impassable. This

has led some to argue for a sea route along the land bridge and then

the western coastline. Others suggest some may have come from

Australia or the Iberian peninsula.

 

But is it civilization?

 

Not everyone is convinced by the evidence so far for pre-Clovis

finds, although some doubters don't rule out the possibility that

some groups where here earlier.

 

"The tools people find are not self-evidently hunting or butchering

tools" in the way Clovis artifacts are, says Stuart Fiedel, an

archaeologist with the Louis Berger Group in Washington, D.C.

 

Like Vikings making landfall in North America before any other

modern European group, pre-Clovis sites don't seem to represent the

first long-term colonization of the Western Hemisphere, he says.

Interest in Clovis grew out of their apparent role as a continent-

wide colonizing population and a key to the origins of the native

Americans Europeans encountered after they arrived.

 

But others see potentially deeper insights coming from pre-Clovis

finds.

 

"This could help us get a better handle on the amount of genetic

variability we see in the descendants of these populations," says

David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in

Dallas. It also could reset the clock for the development of

civilizations in the New World.

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The First Americans: By land or by sea? Researchers have put forth

at least four explanations for how people first came to the

Americas. Recent discoveries suggest humans came to the Americas at

least 10,000 years earlier than has been thought hitherto,

researchers say. That means they must have come by sea rather than

by land across the Bering Strait.

Taken from map by Joe LeMonnier / Lynda D'Amico / SCOTT WALLACE -

STAFF