proof for 130,000-year-old human in California

a reply to: Harte

human, but neanderthal human as far as i know

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: anti72

Homo Sapiens was nothing more than a smart ape. Multiregional origin of Homo Sapiens has many folowers. And the origins go back to about two milllion years. But nobody knows for sure. Besides I find it not so special (sorry about that). What is special to me? That Homo Sapiens made astonishing cave paintings 32.0000 years ago (Chauvet) and no one has found any sign of a normal evolution. The paintings came out of nothing. Some scientists find that some scratches are proof of a gradual evolution. But sometimes proof is a fairly loose term ...

a reply to: zandra

why would there need to be gradual evolution of art?

FWIW, it was gradual enough that our cousins could do it:

www.bbc.com...

And 100k years ago in Blombos Cave in Africa, we were making shells and paintings:

en.wikipedia.org...

ANd our ancestors could do it:

www.nature.com...

it appears that artwork wasn't something appearing out of nowhere 30k years ago.

Howdy Texan - sorry I'm getting back to late on this (way busy), here's some really good starter articles on this - I encourage you to do more research: www.nature.com... advances.sciencemag.org... www.businessinsider.com... - don't know if I buy the Toba theory, because the timing doesn't really work (about 15k years off by certain estimations) however there was most certainly a "DNA Bottleneck" that occurred in the Upper/Middle Paleolithic. Cheers !

One other small item - there are more than 200 cultures/religions that have major flood myths/stories - www.talkorigins.org...

originally posted by: Byrd
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

I'm still very dubious about a 100k + date.

What's interesting is that Dillehay (among others) ain't buyin' it: First Americans claim sparks controversy.

originally posted by: zandra
a reply to: anti72
Homo Sapiens was nothing more than a smart ape. Multiregional origin of Homo Sapiens has many folowers. And the origins go back to about two milllion years. But nobody knows for sure.

We Homo sapiens as a species has only been around for about 200,000 to 250,000 years, not 2 Million.

2 Million years ago was the time of our earlier ancestors such as Homo habilis. If we go back 3 Million years, then we are talking about Australopithecus the ancestor to Homo habilis.

Besides I find it not so special (sorry about that). What is special to me? That Homo Sapiens made astonishing cave paintings 32.0000 years ago (Chauvet) and no one has found any sign of a normal evolution. The paintings came out of nothing. Some scientists find that some scratches are proof of a gradual evolution. But sometimes proof is a fairly loose term ...

Homo sapiens are us, and we are Homo sapiens.

It may be true that evolution is a continuous process, but the Homo sapiens who engaged in cave paintings 35,000 years ago had (for the most part) the same brains as we do. That is, if you could magically go back 35,000 years and take a Homo sapiens newborn baby to bring back to the present, that baby would probably (for the most part) act and learn and solve problems just like a contemporary Homo sapiens (us).

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: Harte

human, but neanderthal human as far as i know

en.wikipedia.org...

Yes. Neanderthal was human. This is why I mentioned it.

Harte

a reply to: anti72

Nice find! I's a sure thing that the popular theories about migration to the Americas are not correct. Remains too old to fit with those have already been found. This is far older.

We need to seriously rethink the accepted ideas.

JohnnyC,

I have noticed that if work challenges Dillehay's at Monte Verde, for age depth, he gets almost defensive and has made some pretty spurious remarks regarding other peoples work.

Dillehays critique is not the most brilliant response ever, pretty lacking actually to be given as much weight as it is.
It boils down to "wheres the stone tools and wheres the human remains".
There are plenty of sites with no human remains or stone tools.
Some neanderthal used bone almost exclusivley for cutting tools, that could be the case here, we see the act of making the bone tools to utilize the carcass.
I dont think this is a kill site, it is almost exactly like a HE elephant scavaging site excavated in africa
There too, they used local cobbles to break the bones of an already dead elephant, to make tools to harvest some of the flesh. That site in kenya? was about 800kya.
Everybody is so focused on the lack of stone tools they are missing obvious clues given by the site and placement of the artefacts.
One argument ive seen made is natural processes could have done this.
Lets look at that closely, what kind of procceses could do this?, number one would be scavengers.
We do have an array of scavengers available at the time and place, some we can rule out due to size like skunks and porcupines. Then there are the canids, dire wolf, wolf, coyotes all would have scavenged the carcass, but only the dire wolf large enough to handle the femur, but still far to small to break them up like that.
Bears: The short faced was big enough and they were scavengers, but they were meat scavengers, their jaws and teeth were not robust enough to crack elephant long bones, interestingly enough, we do see a great number of large mammal long bones in the fossil beds here, because they were to big to scavenge.
Has anyone here tracked a carcass as it scavenged in the wild, I have as an aside to being very outdoorsey, on several occasions, if there is something around big enough to break the big bones the carcass doesnt stay in one place very long, it gets torn up and dragged off to various places.
You certainley arent going to find the femur heads lined up next to each other just a few feet from the tusks, one split and horizontal on the soil surface, and beside it the other driven point first into the ground.
Some of the reasoning above can rule out natural processes like falling rocks or hydraulic energy as well. If there was enough hydraulic enegy available to move a several pound round cobble, completely out of place to the surrounding environment, with enough energy to smash a large bone, repeatedly, breaking it up into smaller pieces, and flaking off small flakes, all the while miraculously hitting the bone on the another piece of out of place stone, yet there is not enough energy available to wash these small bone and rock fragments away from where they fell?
Oh yah, where did the 5 cobbles come from? Their source has not been identified in the upstream drainage, hmmm.

Having read the actual paper and associated materials, I find it hard to fault their conclusions.
To identify usage marks on the items and to check for bone and rock flake refits they brought in independant outside experts who did blind analysis on the items, with out knowing anything about their provenance.
Conclusions of the outside investigators were all by group consensous.
If i get the gist right, the several very influential experiments on butchery and carcass utilization, were actually conducted by members of this group?
Some commentators make it seem like this group found some old photos and made sweeping conclusions from them, that is not the case this paper has been more than 20 years in the making.
I would say that qualifies as due dilligence.
Indeed there are alternative explanations for what was found, but the alternatives stretch physics to the point that it is just easier and far more likley that humans did it rather than some Golbergian chain of events ended up breaking the bones.

a reply to: punkinworks10
I'm seeing a lot of chatter on ARCH-L that concurs. Looks like it could be back to the ol' drawing board.
Once again, so much for those who talk about 'hidden archaeology' and the suppression of evidence.

originally posted by: punkinworks10
Indeed there are alternative explanations for what was found, but the alternatives stretch physics to the point that it is just easier and far more likley that humans did it rather than some Golbergian chain of events ended up breaking the bones.

One critique that I saw (which is on the mark) is that this is not an undisturbed site... that it was located 20 years or more ago and is being prepped for a road, and that tractors and graders have driven over the site. The contention is that what they saw is consistent with having heavy machinery on top of the soil.

Now... I can say this is plausible. Having worked on the "Ellie May" mammoth here in Texas (also found by a road grading operation), the soil is not hard rock and it's possible to shift or crack the bones when heavy machinery drives over it.

a reply to: Byrd

From the paper,

Multiple bone and molar fragments, which show evidence of percussion, together with the presence of an impact notch, and attached and detached cone flakes support the hypothesis that human-induced hammerstone percussion6, 17, 18 was responsible for the observed breakage. Alternative hypotheses (carnivoran modification, trampling, weathering and fluvial processes) do not adequately explain the observed evidence (Supplementary Information 4). No Pleistocene carnivoran was capable of breaking fresh proboscidean femora at mid-shaft19, 20, 21 or producing the wide impact notch22. The presence of attached and detached cone flakes is indicative of hammerstone percussion6, 23, not carnivoran gnawing18 (Supplementary Information 4). There is no other type of carnivoran bone modification21, 24 at the CM site, and nor is there bone modification from trampling22. The differential preservation of fragile ribs and vertebrae rather than heavy limb bones argues against trampling and is consistent with selective breakage by humans. Although some thick cortical limb bone fragments display longitudinal cracks and breaks, these features occurred after percussive bone modification (for example, impact events) and were caused by pre-burial factors (for example, subaerial weathering25) or by post-depositional factors (for example, wetting–drying cycles within the soil zone). The occurrence of large and small bones together with five large cobbles within an otherwise sandy silt horizon indicates that fluvial processes did not transport these bones and stones26 (Supplementary Information 1, 2, 4 and 6). Spiral-fractured femoral fragments and both femoral heads adjacent to cobble CM-281 (Fig. 1a and Extended Data Fig. 3a, b) indicate that both femora were broken in that location. The vertical tusk (CM-56; Extended Data Figs 3c, 7c) is interpreted as the result of purposeful placement

The bones were broken when fresh not 130k years after being broken.

Again, the totality of the evidence rules out tractors.

First off, I find this fascinating. It may appear that the "science" isn't settled.



Secondly. . . . . they found the 130,000 year old person.

her name is Cher.

originally posted by: DBCowboy
First off, I find this fascinating. It may appear that the "science" isn't settled.

Science by definition is never settled. Part of science is the continuous search for new data/new research that can either confirm or cast doubt upon a past theory.

That's what the scientific process does. One scientist has a theory that seems successfully tested, but then other scientists are constantly looking for evidence that supports or contradicts that theory.

Secondly. . . . . they found the 130,000 year old person.

her name is Cher.

Ha ha! Cher is so old that there are probably millennials on ATS asking "who's that?"

I found an interesting article on german media..
german archeologists found a method of extracting human DNA out of sediment, very promising..

www.spiegel.de...

Neue DNA-Analyse Urmenschen-Erbgut in Sand nachgewiesen.

Aus einem Häufchen Staub schließen, wer vor Jahrtausenden an dieser Stelle lebte - klingt nach Science-Fiction? Genau das ist deutschen Forschern jetzt gelungen.Das Erbgut eines 400.000 Jahre alten Menschen entschlüsseln? Kein Problem, wenn man neben der richtigen Technik dessen Knochen zur Hand hat. Doch was, wenn nicht? Da könnte eine neue Entwicklung helfen.

Wissenschaftler sind künftig nämlich nicht mehr zwingend auf konkrete Überreste angewiesen, um Tiere und Frühmenschen an Ausgrabungsstätten nachzuweisen. Ein internationales Team unter Leitung des Max-Planck-Instituts für evolutionäre Anthropologie in Leipzig hat eine Methode entwickelt, um Erbgutproben auch aus Ablagerungen gewinnen und untersuchen zu können. Forscher um Matthias Meyer konnten über den genetischen Code Neandertaler und Denisova-Menschen sowie verschiedene Säugetierarten nachweisen.

originally posted by: anti72
I found an interesting article on german media..
german archeologists found a method of extracting human DNA out of sediment, very promising..

www.spiegel.de...

Yes. the ability to sort and study DNA in cave soil will be a great new tool for archaeologists. The articles I read on this suggest it could be uses to help answer the question posed in this thread about the claim of humans in the Americas 130,000 years ago.

For those (such as myself) who can't read the German article you posted, here is an English article discussing the same new DNA-from-soil technique (not a translation of the one in the post above, but instead a different article on the subject written in English):

No bones needed: ancient DNA in soil can tell if humans were around

Even though no Neanderthal bones have been found with the tools, the paper’s authors are the first to be able to detect the presence of humans based on DNA found in the soil. This allows them to paint a much more detailed picture of the past, in Denisova Cave and elsewhere.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

That technique is fascinating, but unlikely to be of much help at the ceruti site.
Denisova cave was a habitation site, people lived within the confines of the cave. They ate, slept, poo'ed and pee'd and buried their dead in the cave, so there would be a lot of dna in the environment.
Ceruti might have been a short term camp at water hole, but it wasnt a long term habitation like denisova.
The climate in southern california is also to hot and variable for good dna preservation, while the climate inside denisova cave is very consistently cool.At that time I believe that the climate was very similar to today's SoCal. In fact i found this nifty book about what cal would have looked like in the past, particularly during this period,
A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California

One place where this technique may provide additional information is Dasiy cave in Oregon, which has provided evidence for people being there 14kya, and it is still vigourously contested, one recent detractor claimed that the group was studying coyote poo, and that humans never lived in the cave.

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: Byrd

The bones were broken when fresh not 130k years after being broken.

Again, the totality of the evidence rules out tractors.

Yes, I'd read that in the paper - the remark about tractors was from another paleontologist.

My only experience was helping prep one mammoth a few years ago. Because the bones were not completely fossilized (which appears to be the same with these contested bones), it was surprisingly easy to damage them... with Popsicle sticks (which (honest) was what we were using to remove most of the sediment.)

Because of lack of any other suggestive evidence (finding human traces in the Arctic that are 90K years old, for instance) I am going to go with "disturbed after death" (I have seen bones driven vertically into the ground when other animals walked over them in a muddy/swampy area (specifically, hadrosaur bones which would kind of be comparable)) rather than "incredibly ancient people."

Should supporting evidence arise, I'm willing to change my mind. But I'll shave with Occam's Razor for the time being and say "misinterpretation."