CNN Reporting humans in N. America 50 000 years ago

LINK TO STORY

Very Interesting. A cofnrence will be held next year to go over the findings of this site and other sites.

Small excerpt from the articleGoodyear has been excavating the Topper dig site along the Savannah River since the 1980s. He recovered artifacts and tools last May that are expected to push the date of colonization back before most of the earliest known settlements on the continent.

Well, it seems like the US and Canadian anthropologists are finally beginning to be reasonable. For many decades they were adamant in their belief that the oldest human remains in the Americas belonged to the so-called Clovis people (around 15000 years ago). Latin American anthropologist (especially Mexican and Argentinos) proposed the theory that human presence in the Americas was much more ancient, and they have hard proofs of this: there are numerous sites both in Chile and Tierra del Fuego that are contemporary to the Clovis people (the most interesting is the so-called Ultima Esparanza, renamed recently Cueva del Milodon), while a number of sites have older findings: for example the Chapala lake yelded drilled deer bones that have been dated at around 20000 BC. The problem with paleoanthropology is the domination of obsolete theories, defended with desperate strength by "power groups" (for example, the so-called South-African mafia). These people will stop at nothing to defend their positions: many a brilliant researcher had his/her carrer ruined when he/she refused to deny the "heretical" theories he/she had nursed.

Thanks for the link!

I tend to go along with the archaeolgists who say that man arrived in the New World at least 20,000 years ago and even before that. 50k years would be an exciting verification and certainly would reshape some of our notions!

It'll have to be confirmed by independent tests and certainly raises some intriguing cultural questions. This is definately a development to keep our eyes on!

I find this interesting:

Many scientists thought humans first ventured into the New World across a land bridge from present-day Russia into Alaska about 13,000 years ago.

This new discovery suggests humans may have crossed the land bridge into the Americas much earlier -- possibly during an ice age -- and rapidly colonized the two continents.

"It poses some real problems trying to explain how you have people (arriving) in Central Asia almost at the same time as people in the Eastern United States," said Theodore Schurr, anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a curator at the school's museum.

Admittedly I do not study this field so I plead complete ignorance. Is it possible people once lived in extreme polar areas in the past and an ice age forced their migration south? Given that they were arriving in Central Asia and the Eastern US concurrently it makes you wonder.

This is definately an interesting find but after reading the article I feel compelled to do two things. 1. Reserve judgement. 2. Review the facts for myself as they are released.

I note two key facts from the article which cause me to want more raw information which can be examined independently by some of the bright people here on ATS:

Many of the artifacts found were stone implements, which on their own can not be carbon dated. The release of all information and the peer review of that information will be important to establishing the reliability of the 50,000 BP date.

Professor Schurr stipulated that comparrison to tools of that period in Asia was one of the criteria for verifying the date of the site. He said this inspite of his tacit admission that the dating of this discovery would pose tremendous problems for the land bridge theory.
This heralds the potential use of a self-contradicting assumption to "disprove" the age of the site. "The find which supposedly proves by its age that people came to America too early to have crossed the land bridge is not really that old, because the technology is not identical to asian technology of such a period."


IF this site on the eastern coast of the US, turns out to be 50,000 years old, it would seem to me that we are probably looking at seafaring Homo sapiens very early on, or else proto-humans who preceded Homo sapiens across the land bridge.