Anyone want to talk Pre-Clovis Crap?

reply to post by ANNED


You present a very legitimate and interesting argument.
I need to read your links before commenting about them.
Are you aware of the bog people found, a little west of Daytona Fla.
They were wrapped and buried in a muslin type fabric. The soft tissue of the brains were still intact.
They had C14 dates of approx. 9.000 ybp. I'll try and post the info when I find it.
You are aware that the Smithonian claimed that before Clovis the oldest remains in the US were only 3,500 ybp. They didn't want to challenge the biblical date for Adam and Eve 4,000 ybp.
(ybp) years before present.

reply to post by ANNED


ANNED
Bean sure does seem to want to force a square peg into a round hole. I can not say he is wrong but he does seem a little biased.
Kenniwick really is telling about the political grasp on the truth here in the states.
I guess it is what had turned me sour about recent finds.
I was introduced to archeology by some old timers that have all left us years ago.
They believed in and taught the "Discipline" as it was called back then 1950-60's.
True accountability is hard to come by these days.
That's what is nice discussing these topics here on ATS.
Often times the official reports if you can ever locate them
are way different than the media frenzy about the finds.
Thanks for those links.
BTW A first rate fellow I met out in the desert north of Barstow sent me some China Lake obsidian.
I flaked it up and sent him some points. He worked out there for years.
Donny

Here are some Clovis points from the Gault site in Texas.
From yahoo images.
My first graphic upload so don't expect to much.
The photo is cliped off on the right side where the best of the lot is.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/52cfeec46f9c.jpg[/atsimg]

[edit on 10-12-2009 by Donny 4 million]

I thought you all might enjoy this article.
No authors name and date that I could find.

Part One


www.about.com... archaeology.about.com...
Ten Things I Learned at Clovis & Beyond
As I sit in my hotel room on a crisp night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, my mind reels from the impact of the Clovis and Beyond conference. From October 28 through 31st, 1999, nearly 1,200 people converged on the Sweeney Conference center, to discuss, debate, and scrap over just who were the first people to colonize the American continents. They also came to show their goodies; a whole room was set aside to bring together for the first time people who, like me, are fascinated by the hidden history of the American continent migration.

Since my brain is still reeling, I'll restrict this column to a brief list of the top ten things I learned in the last 48 hours. In the long tradition of top ten lists, I'll start with the minor shocks and end with the major earthquake of the weekend.

10. Various attendees were extremely displeased with the presentation of the Monte Verde criticism in Scientific American's Discovering Archaeology this month. Researchers such as Monte Verde excavator Tom Dillehay objected to the essays on three points: the personal and borderline insulting tone of the =Stuart Fiedel critique; the location of that critique in a non-academic and non-peer-reviewed venue; and the limited amount of time Dillehay received to respond in the same issue. The science of archaeology may be reaching toward open peer review, but we're going to have to learn to be polite about our differences before it becomes advancement of the science.

9. The ethical issues surrounding the Kennewick Man controversy are clouded by the uneven and ad hoc implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). There are no guidelines in NAGPRA to deal with unaffiliated cultural remains such as Kennewick Man (i.e., remains which cannot be attributed to any one modern culture), particularly with respect to how much study needs to be performed, who does it, and the final dispensation of the remains. In many cases, it is up to the local administrator to decide who gets the bones and when, and s/he has no guidelines to make that decision. The unaffiliated remains include the oldest skeletal material in the Americas, and they are our best lines of information for learning who the Paleo-American people were. Because of this legislative black hole, they are at risk of being lost forever. Many are already reburied, including Buhl woman from Idaho, Spirit Cave from Nevada, and the Pelican Lake and Browns Valley skeletons, Minnesota.

8. New results from mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) investigations suggest at least five separate waves of migration from founding populations of the old world are in evidence among the Native American populations today; however, this data does not conclusively state which founder population might have been first or when "first" might have happened. Partially matching gene haplotypes are found in modern day north Asians, south Asians, Pacific Rim peoples, and Indo-European peoples; but additional colonizations have not been ruled out yet.

7. George Frison, who was named Archaeologist of the Century, would have named H. Marie Wormington Archaeologist of the Century, had anyone asked him.

6. There are a lot of Clovis sites in North America; none are north of British Columbia. The earliest dates on Clovis occupations seem to be in the southeastern United States at the Aucilla River sites in Florida. There are no clear technological precursors to Clovis in Asia any closer than the Lake Baikal region, at several localities at a site called Stud'onoye, some 2700 miles west of the Bering Strait, somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,200-18,800 years ago, and there is nothing even remotely like it in between.

Part Two

5. There are numerous pre-Clovis sites in South America--but none appear to be the progenitors of Clovis. By the time of the first Clovis sites, around 11,500 years ago, all areas of South America were settled; from coastal Venezuela Taima-Taima site of 13,000 years before the present; Andean Colombia Tibitó site of 11,700 ybp, Peruvian Andes sites of Pachamachay (11,800 ypb) and Pikimachay (14,000 ybp), Monte Verde at the southern tip of Chile at 12,500 ybp; the Patagonian grasslands sites of Los Toldos of 12,600 ybp, Piedra Museo 12,200 ybp, and Alero Tres Arroyos, 11,800 ybp; Brazil's Lapa de Boquete at 12,100 ypb, and the Amazonian rain forest site of Pedra Pintada, 11,100 ypb.

4. One possible reason for the long-term belief in Clovis as the first culture in the Americas may be the result of poor preservation of non-lithic materials such as wood, ivory, bone, textiles, and other perishable items. Evidence for the existence of these types of materials are present at Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Monte Verde, but have been largely ignored in the severe criticism of these two sites over the decades since their first identification.Yes, Adovasio is still ticked off.

3. Clovis wasn't first in North America either. There are sites predating Clovis in several locations around the North American continent, including in Wisconsin at the Schaefer (12,300 years before the present), Hebior (12,500 ybp), Mud Lake (13,400 ybp), and Fenske (13,500 ybp) mammoth butchering sites; in Virginia at Cactus Hill (15,700 bp) and the Saltville site (14,500-13,500 years bp); at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania (16,000 ybp); at La Sena, Nebraska (18-19,000 years bp) and Lovewell, Kansas (18,000 years bp); and at Big Eddy in Missouri (12,000 bp). And that doesn't even mention any of the older sites yet in South America, such as Pedra Furada (32,000) or Monte Verde I, (33,400 ybp) or or Bluefish Caves (23,000 ybp) in Canada.

2. But some researchers still believe in Clovis first.

1. For the last fifteen or twenty years there have been occasional comparisons of Clovis technology to the Middle Paleolithic Solutrean cultures of the Iberian peninsula. Dennis Stanford gave the banquet speech at Clovis and Beyond, hypothesizing that Clovis in the Americas represents colonization of the eastern American seaboard by boat across the North Atlantic, following along the ice shelf that in the late Pleistocene stretched from Ireland to Nova Scotia. All of the tools and techniques of Clovis can be found in Solutrean assemblages, including thin projectile points, wedges, very long thin bifaces, outré passé flaking, red ochre, gouge-eyed needles, bone and ivory projectiles points, bevelled ivory foreshafts, decorated bone rods, limestone palettes. And the journey would have been 2,500 miles by boat along the ice shelf.


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The Clovis and Beyond conference was a tremendous success, and you will hear more in this space concerning the findings.

Here I will state my problem with Clovis/Pre Clovis.

Clovis is presented primarily by association with the large, thin, and a technically near impossible basal flute.
This flute in particular, is what makes Clovis unique.
I have absolutely no problem with the evolution of projectiles from Clovis to the present in the Americas.
Bare in mind that, the basal, hinged fractured flute appears nowhere in the world except in the Americas
and in the established Clovis time frame.
It is designed and produced by a culture with brains and advanced technical skill.
These weapons were made for deep penetration through very thick skinned creatures.
In my opinion a requirement for survival during that era.
These Clovis points have been found imbedded in the bones of Mastodons and Mammoths.
Try to imagine the competition you would have back then.
Huge predators, like the numerous Bears. large Cats
that grew to maturity and attacked from trees.
The Dire Wolves that were way bigger than Timber Wolves
and hunted in packs.
You and your family are continually hunted and you can only hunt while you are awake
and not preoccupied by other life functions.
The Clovis point has been found through out the entirety of the habitable Americas.
A long and large substantiated Culture.
There unquestionably has to be a predecessor to those dynamic folks.
A tiny hand full of non-similar projectiles from all corners of the Americas do not make a viable linear transition in my opinion.
If all the pre-Clovis site dates are accurate, ( Big If ) then it would suggest that people walked and sailed into the Americas years before the Clovis folks. DNA results seem to point in this direction.
Since they were so poorly equipped. It is my opinion that they were lucky as all get out, to survive at all.
They would have perished before evolving into Clovis.
This still leaves the mystery of "Where did Clovis originate?"