Bah to New Claims of Ice Age Europeans in America

Dennis Sanford is at it again, still hawking his claim that Europeans made it to America 20,000 years ago. He started this argument back in the 1990s, based on alleged similarities between Clovis Points (right) and the Solutrean spear points of Europe (left). That argument never impressed me; how many ways are there of working stone? Is it really surprising that two different cultures would hit on similar technologies? Stanford once wrote that "the idea of independent invention is an unsupported opinion and not a tested hypothesis," which is a pretty bold claim considering how many things have been independently invented by different human cultures. (Agriculture? Writing? Bronze?) There are groundstone celts in North America that look exactly like groundstone celts from Neolithic Europe, and nobody seems to think that implies contact.

Now Sanford is back with a new book, coauthored with Bruce Bradley, and what they say is new evidence:

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

Actually none of this evidence is new, and all of it has problems. Darrin Lowery's sites are hugely controversial, and as I understand it none of his radiocarbon dates is really in very close association with his stone tools. The Pennsylvania site referred to here is Meadowcroft, which I don't think proves anything, and anyway I am joining a boycott of discussing that site until they actually publish a report of the findings. (The excavation was finished 25 years ago, so the report is a bit overdue.) The Virginia site is Cactus Hill, which is a very interesting site, but I think the evidence from there (artifacts from below the Clovis zone) has the same problem as the Buttermilk Creek site in Texas, i.e.,the artifacts could have moved down through the soil. The artifacts dredged up by scallop fishermen consist of a fascinating stone tool and, separately, a piece of mastodon tusk that dates to 22,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that these two things are associated. They were found lying in a local museum years after their discovery, and all sorts of things might have happened to them in between.

Sanford is also pointing to what he says is genetic evidence of European genes in the Native American gene pool, specifically the mitochondrial DNA marker  known as haplogroup X2A. Modern Asians don't have it, but a few Native Americans do. So? The Asians of 15,000 years ago were not the same as Asians today, and it is stretching the data very far to say that they cannot have had it. As most people see it, the genetic evidence actually points more firmly all the time to a single, Siberian origin point for Native Americans.

I don't mean to sound dogmatic about this. I regard the question of when and how people got to the New World as very much open. I take the skeptical tone here because the bias in the scientific press is so strongly in favor of new discoveries and new ideas, which are always trumpeted as "overturning" orthodoxy and "proving" that the old fuddies are wrong. It is a good problem because the evidence conflicts. On the one hand you have the Clovis first theory, which presents a coherent story of arrival from Asia around 13,500 years ago and the subsequent spread of a single culture throughout the Americas. If there were other people around, how did the Clovis people spread from Canada to Tierra del Fuego in a couple of centuries? On the other hand you have an ever-increasing number of sites with radiocarbon dates that are older, sometimes much older, than Clovis. Two problems with the alleged pre-Clovis cultures have always been, first, they they look nothing alike, and, second, that they span a huge range of time. If you accept radiocarbon dates of 18,000 BP, what do you say about dates from South America of 33,000 and even 55,000? Could a human population have existed in the Americans for 25,000 years without leaving more evidence than a handful of controversial sites? I would say not. But could a human population have existed here for even 5,000 years without leaving more evidence?

In recent years, though, there has been some movement in North America toward a less chaotic picture of pre-Clovis people. Pentagonal bifaces like the ones above have been found at at a couple of sites; these are from the deep layer at Cactus Hill, and some also came from Meadowcroft (or so it is said, pending publication) and other places, all in the 18,000 to 16,000 BP time frame. Darrin Lowery's Eastern Shore sites, buried under several feet of wind-blown soil, are also interesting, as are the mastodon and mammoth butchering sites in Wisconsin and Washington. So, who knows, maybe there were a few people in North America then. But it certainly is not proved, and Dennis Sanford's latest sally does not deserve the glowing, excited response it is getting in too many places.