Serra da Capivara is Nonsense on Stilts

The Times has an article today on the supposed archaeological site of Serra da Capivara in Brazil, which partisans say is at least 22,000 and maybe 30,000 years old.

Balderdash.

If people were in the Americas 22,000 years ago, where are their remains? Even if you add together all the claims of pre-Clovis humans in the Americas you still only have a handful of sites representing a few hundred people. You're telling me that humans managed to live all across the Americas for 8,000 years while leaving virtually no trace of themselves beyond a few broken rocks and butchered bones?

Consider, by comparison, the evidence for entry around 13,500 years ago, the "Clovis First" model. At that time the human population began to grow exponentially, dozens of species of animals went extinct, the number of forest fires increased, and the record of human presence is dense across the landscape. There are hundreds of Clovis sites and thousands of Clovis spear points. Within 3,000 years, in the Early Archaic period, the population had grown so much that there are tens of thousands of sites and hundreds of thousands of spear points.

The Clovis culture can't represent the first people in the Americas, since it originated in North America. But if you ask me it most have come early in the sequence. I can easily accept that people arrived 500 years before the Clovis explosion, and I might be willing to grant a thousand. But beyond that it strains credulity to imagine people wandering all over two continents, leaving so little record and having no impact on the environment. Plus, the DNA from the Anzick Baby confirms that Clovis people were close to the genetic origin of all Native Americans, showing once again that if there were people around before, say, 14,500 years ago, they somehow mysteriously died out, leaving no descendants.

And while I'm complaining, let me again rant about the way certain "scientists" insist on framing this debate. The Brazilian site, says the times:

adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

“If they’re right, and there’s a great possibility that they are, that will change everything we know about the settlement of the Americas,” said Walter Neves, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of São Paulo whose own analysis of an 11,000-year-old skull in Brazil implies that some ancient Americans resembled aboriginal Australians more than they did Asians.

Up and down the Americas, scholars say that the peopling of lands empty of humankind may have been far more complex than long believed. The radiocarbon dating of spear points found in the 1920s near Clovis, N.M., placed the arrival of big-game hunters across the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, long forming the basis of when humans were believed to have arrived in the Americas.

No, no, no. Clovis First is not now and has never been the consensus view of archaeologists. The view that humans were here in the Ice Age is actually older, and the two ideas have been in conflict ever since Clovis First was proposed. I am not even sure that it has ever been the majority view.

Plus, comparison of skulls? That's nineteenth-century pseudo-science. We have DNA now to look into these questions, and it says unequivocally that all Native Americans are descended from the same small group of Asian migrants.

The Times does quote two archaeologists who are critical of the supposed Serra da Capivara artifacts: Gary Haynes, who says they are natural, and my colleague Stuart Fiedel, who notes that they might have been made by monkeys. Fiedel's old enemy Tom Dillehay of the Monte Verde pseudo-site says that the monkey idea is "stupid," but why? We know that modern monkeys can make and use tools, so why not monkeys of 22,000 years ago?

It is discouraging sometimes. Not that the debate goes on; the question is not settled, and given that this all happened more than 13,000 years ago it will be hard to settle. What is depressing is that people supposed to care about the past are so short-sighted about the history of their own profession and seem to know nothing about how this debate has evolved. Even worse is the playground taunting that some archaeologists like to use instead of argument:

“The Clovis paradigm is finally buried,” said Eric Boëda, the French archaeologist leading the excavations here.

No, it isn't, and it won't be until somebody can offer another explanation of why the Americas were so different after Clovis than they were before.