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posted by martyb on Friday April 28 2017, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the shoulda-made-a-left-at-Albuquerque dept.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39710311

A study that claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago - much earlier than previously suggested - has run into controversy.

Humans are thought to have arrived in the New World no earlier than 25,000 years ago, so the find would push back the first evidence of settlement by more than 100,000 years.

The conclusions rest on analysis of animal bones and tools from California.

But many experts contacted by the BBC said they doubted the claims.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @02:30PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @02:30PM (#501169)

    Well, there were pieces of mastodon in cracks of several of the stones. The objection is more that the tools look like make-shift, produced on-site. Such tools are per definition rough (look like broken stones).

    Such tools are what one would expect of H. erectus for example. But obviously, one can always find something that looks like a hammer when looking at a lot of naturally broken stones....

    Still, it is hard to explain how the animal broke its (rather thick) bones, without something applying concentrated force on a very small area. The sediment is relatively undisturbed, natural causes explaining this find are more improbable than tool-wielders.

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday April 28 2017, @04:58PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday April 28 2017, @04:58PM (#501226) Journal

    The objection is more that the tools look like make-shift, produced on-site. Such tools are per definition rough (look like broken stones).

    Well, that's not what the experts quoted in TFA say. They say:

    "To demonstrate such early occupation of the Americas requires the presence of unequivocal stone artefacts. There are no unequivocal stone tools associated with the bones... this site is likely just an interesting paleontological locality." [...]

    Another authority on early American archaeology, Prof David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, said: "Nature is mischievous and can break bones and modify stones in a myriad of ways. [...] one has to demonstrate they could not have been broken by nature. This is an equifinality problem: multiple processes can cause the same product." [...]

    And another expert:

    "High and concentrated forces must have been required to smash the thickest mastodon bones, and the low energy depositional environment seemingly provides no obvious alternative to humans using the heavy cobbles found with the bones."

    Maybe there are other types of objections too, but the ones raised in TFA weren't postulating other primates or other types of early humans -- they were debating whether these things could have been caused by natural processes, as I said before.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday April 28 2017, @05:04PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday April 28 2017, @05:04PM (#501228) Journal

    Well, there were pieces of mastodon in cracks of several of the stones.

    By the way, where are you getting that? TFA says only: "Rocks found alongside the mastodon remains show signs of wear and being struck against other surfaces, the researchers say." If what you said is true (and animal fragments were actually embedded in the stones), that's a LOT stronger evidence than TFA suggests for tool use. Unless I missed it, TFA implies there were just rocks found in the same general area that looked like they had been hit against other hard things.