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?
Well, maybe. I find your resistance to pre-Clovis as interesting as the claims. I recognize you're not ruling out pre-Clovis, merely some of the current "proof."
ReplyDeleteOne needs to develop a law for paleontology similar to the one about memory capacity. The age of anything will be pushed back at a certain rate. It's inevitable. Any dates we have now are only early guesses. You'll find dates creep backwards inexorably. Knowing nothing about the science but only looking at the progress over the last few decades, I can safely predict that the date of the first people in America will be consistently pushed further and further back. Clovis will turn out to be a mid-point, at best.
You will find that by the time of Clovis—hell, by the time of Solutrean—seafaring was advanced. You'll find that by the time of Australia, seafaring was advanced. You'll find that people came to and went from the Americas forever and from wherever. You'll find this out because there's no reason to believe that the discoveries of archeology will stop. There is every reason to think the trends will continue in a predictable line.
Some things in archeology simply aren't well thought out, such as the importance placed on the Bering land bridge. Considering we've been maritime for a minimum of 60,000 years, the Bering Straits are nothing. Besides, we're a coastal/shore hugging monkey. We always move along the coast. We only go inland when the shore is filled up, and then we follow rivers and look for lakes. That savannah story is a myth. We never lived on the savannah. Don't now and probably never did. That's what I mean by some things not being thought out well. If one simply looks at human behavior, the land bridge option would never have been guessed.
So, that there could be 19-26,000 year old tools on the East Coast? Sure, could be. Eventually tools that old will be found, if they haven't already. Might as well get used to it. It's just statistics; nothing you can do about it.
Indeed evidence accumulates that somebody was in North America before Clovis. In fact, since Clovis developed in North America, somebody must have been. But many categories of evidence point to the Clovis era as a time of remarkable happenings: the massive extinction of mammals, the incredibly rapid spread of Clovis culture itself (faster than the spread of European culture after 1492), a major increase in evidence of fire, etc. If Clovis represents the first (or nearly the first) humans on the continent, all that is explained. But if people had been in North America for 10,000 years, how do you account for the evidence of dramatic events in the Clovis period? How did Clovis spread? Why did all those animals go extinct? And, since the genetic evidence points overwhelmingly to a single migration in roughly the Clovis time frame, what happened to all of those earlier people?
ReplyDeleteIt is not "proof" of pre-Clovis people I am looking for, it is a consistent, believable account of the history of North America. Pre-Clovis theories cannot offer one.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313000873
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, that link above is to an article that attempts to refute the idea that Clovis and Solutrean technologies are meaningfully similar. I'm convinced, but then I already was.
ReplyDeleteGood basis for discussion. I don't believe in the clovis-solutrean connection either but for a different reason. I'm a flintknapper. I see differences in the manufacturing techniques that tell me that the technologies were different.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing that puzzles me is the idea that a technology (or material culture) must travel with a group of people and cannot be spread from one culture to another. Where does this idea come from? To me, it makes perfect sense that a technology as useful as clovis would spread like wildfire among the peoples and cultures currently living in the Americas.
Where does the idea that a material culture, like Clovis, has to travel with a group of people? Is there a big sign somewhere that says, "If people don't carry the technology, it ain't goin' anywhere"? Dang, I miss everything.
ReplyDeleteSerriously, a very useful and versatile technology like clovis spreading like wildfire among the peoples already living in the Americas makes perfect sense to me. But then again, I'm just a flintknapper. What do I know?