As I said, attempts to stifle discussion. It isn't funny and I don't appreciate it.
It's much easier to say 'the club', or 'destroyed evidence', or 'my dog ate my homework' then to do the real research needed.
Doug, first of all let's get something straight here. My dog did eat my homework.
I don't believe in a club, but I do believe in hardened attitudes and incompetence since I experience it daily. With regard to Valsequillo and other sites sometimes items get lost because nobody cares, or they get swept into the trash to clean off a table. That's incompetence. I would love to see the Dorenberg skull analysed by current techniques, but the Allies bombed it to dust during WWII. So, someone needs to locate another specimen. Until done, no conclusive evidence of precursor hominids in the Americas exists. Solorzano's finding from Lake Chapala is interesting, but the provenance isn't air tight.
If the evidence is there, it will surface over time. Nobody is stifling field research and if I find the first ancient bones near Calico, they will certainly not disappear under the auspices of the club -- I'm too crafty and annoying for that.
Not the foot prints Doug, no. If correct, what I read was one of the Meican archaeologists destroyed recovered artifacts.
Possibly an urban myth?
But what about this attitude?
By George Weber from the net.
Quote:
Hueyatlaco was discovered and first excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams in 1960, with further excavations from 1962 to 1966. Controversy followed the publications of her discoveries and the dating of the site to 1,000,000 years. Yes, you read right. One Million Years. Work briefly resumed with a new team in 2004 and it was hoped that new finds together with new and more reliable dating technologies would sort things out. It did not. True, the new dating reduced the claimed age to a milder but still massive 250,000 years. Unfortunately, the new datingwas still way too early to fit into any halfway realistic scenario - and it is begging the question what the earlier 1,000,000 date had been all about.
So if scientific dating does not fit your pre-conceived notions they must be wrong!
Does this guy not understand just how stupid he sounds I wonder?
I posted this earlier. The statement above about dates was after the dating results were obtained from, amongst others, Oxford Uni. Such an attitude does little to encourage belief in acedemic honesty I think.
Doug, no one attempts to stifle discussion more than the establishment. I understand that you don't buy that and I have to tell you that frankly I don't really care.
Even errors can result in progress.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
How true. My favorite example involves Sir Fred Hoyle. He argued for years in support of the Steady State Theory, proving him wrong resulted in great advances.
Last Spring, Josh Bernstein did a special on Atlantis. One guy was Robert Sarmast who was doing a side scan search for Atlantis in the area of the Med to the north of Cyprus.
He failed. Nonetheless, valuable information about the side scan sonar technique was obtained for the future use of others. It's no skin off anyone's nose that this guy was out there looking for Atlantis. But The Club doesn't seem to see it that way. They'd apparently rather than no one goes looking for what they have already decided cannot possibly be.
And what you end up from that is the attitude that Hardaker reported.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Well, I hope everyone had a nice day. I'm just getting back in. As for the pre-Clovis debate, it's over for me.
At the Topper site this spring, I was shown all the proof I need by one of the Archaeologists working there. Down on the Pleistocene terrace is an excavated hole 15 ft. deep. There - plainly seen - is a dark mass of organic mattter - origin unknown. There is no C14 present in the matter.
Inches below that is a core of chert sticking out of the wall. It bears marks of human workmanship that leave no doubt in the minds of many experts who have examined it. It is dated at 50,300 years old.
I stared at it for some time. This core was , for me, the smoking gun that shot the Clovis First theory dead.
It's been killed so many times but it keeps moving.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Digit wrote:Not the foot prints Doug, no. If correct, what I read was one of the Meican archaeologists destroyed recovered artifacts.
Possibly an urban myth?
But what about this attitude?
By George Weber from the net.
Quote:
Hueyatlaco was discovered and first excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams in 1960, with further excavations from 1962 to 1966. Controversy followed the publications of her discoveries and the dating of the site to 1,000,000 years. Yes, you read right. One Million Years. Work briefly resumed with a new team in 2004 and it was hoped that new finds together with new and more reliable dating technologies would sort things out. It did not. True, the new dating reduced the claimed age to a milder but still massive 250,000 years. Unfortunately, the new datingwas still way too early to fit into any halfway realistic scenario - and it is begging the question what the earlier 1,000,000 date had been all about.
So if scientific dating does not fit your pre-conceived notions they must be wrong!
Does this guy not understand just how stupid he sounds I wonder?
I posted this earlier. The statement above about dates was after the dating results were obtained from, amongst others, Oxford Uni. Such an attitude does little to encourage belief in acedemic honesty I think.
I don't know about the Mexican archaeologist. Might be true, not all archaeologists are saints (well, none of them are of course). One in Japan has almost ruined the reputation of Japanese archaeology. But you can't use them to characterise archaeologists in general.
And Weber is not an archaeologist of course, so you can't use him to slam archaeologists. The whole quote is:
The Hueyatlaco site is famous not for the finds made on it but for the ferocious and apparently interminable controversy surrounding it. Careers have been wrecked, friendships ruined, conspiracy theories left howling in the dark and dreary wood. There are so many conflicting "facts" and "counter facts" and so many quarreling individuals, factions, laboratories and other institutions that any find from the site is essentially useless now - at least until the mess is sorted out and some generally agreed and securely dated results published. There is no sign of that happening any time soon.
Hueyatlaco was discovered and first excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams in 1960, with further excavations from 1962 to 1966. Controversy followed the publications of her discoveries and the dating of the site to 1,000,000 years. Yes, you read right. One Million Years. Work briefly resumed with a new team in 2004 and it was hoped that new finds together with new and more reliable dating technologies would sort things out. It did not. True, the new dating reduced the claimed age to a milder but still massive 250,000 years. Unfortunately, the new datingwas still way too early to fit into any halfway realistic scenario - and it is begging the question what the earlier 1,000,000 date had been all about.
There are many methods of dating archaeological remains and each has its range, limits, advantages and disadvantages. As the number, accuracy and sensitity of the methods available increase, it becomes ever more important to be SURE what precisely it is that one is trying to date. A few molecules that don't belong to the sample you want to date can shoot your result to kingdom come. There is a fancy name for such phoney results: pseudocharchaeology. This is not to say that Hueyatlaco is not a genuine or old site. It most likely is. But its dating has all the hallmarks of classic pseudery. The Toloquilla footprints, a site next door to the Hueyatlaco site, has similar dating problems. Coincidence? What is it with the datings by Americans of sites around the Valsequillo Reservoir ?
Modern Homo sapiens branched off on its own some time before 100,000 years ago from other Homo species in Africa. For this there is good archaeological and genetic evidence of all kinds even though datings naturally remain a little fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that a Homo of some sort could have reached America to make copious numbers of relatively sophisticated stone tools there a mindboggling million years before suspiciously similar stone tools were made elsewhere in the world just a few thousand or ten thousand years ago. On present evidence, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did not leave Africa and the Middle East to spread much outside Africa until some time around 70,000 years ago (see also Toba volcano).
A Homo other than sapiens would be very unlikely indeed in the Americas, and that is putting it mildly. Such cannot be seriously proposed until convincing and securely dated evidence of a pre-Homo sapiens presence has been found there. The Hueyatlaco results supply not a trace of such evidence (nor does anything else in the Americas so far). Tools with highly unusual date claims are intriguing and beg for more research, but they cannot justify moving human or pre-human entry into the Americas backward by 250,000, let alone one million years. Perhaps the quarrelsome parties all pipe down, reduce the excessive noise level and get on with collecting a lot more hard data in the field, including perchance a few useful human or pre-human remains so we can all see what those ultra-early Americans looked like when at home.
The consensus based on the hitherto available evidence is that America was settled sometime between 12,000 and 50,000 years ago. Until recently even finds claiming to be 15,000 years old had been regarded as very controversial, let alone tools claiming to be a million years old. The present widely accepted facts may be all wrong, but let us have some evidence a little more solid than a few windy claims on stone tools before we are asked to consider the proposals buzzing around Hueyatlaco. Some remains of those million-year-old tool-makers would be helpful, too..
With this provocatively patronizing remark, all good Americanologists and true will unite in the righteous struggle against the conceited, hoity-toity, decadent know-all European (Swiss, actually) who wrote these lines. That's right, unite, stop braining each other and go to dig out what Hueyatlaco is really all about. That'll show us doubting Thomases ! And boy oh boy, do you need more secure data on Hueyatlaco!
Beagle wrote:Well, I hope everyone had a nice day. I'm just getting back in. As for the pre-Clovis debate, it's over for me.
At the Topper site this spring, I was shown all the proof I need by one of the Archaeologists working there. Down on the Pleistocene terrace is an excavated hole 15 ft. deep. There - plainly seen - is a dark mass of organic mattter - origin unknown. There is no C14 present in the matter.
Inches below that is a core of chert sticking out of the wall. It bears marks of human workmanship that leave no doubt in the minds of many experts who have examined it. It is dated at 50,300 years old.
I stared at it for some time. This core was , for me, the smoking gun that shot the Clovis First theory dead.
Your a few decades late then. It was over for me long, long ago.
Hm, dated 50,300 years old. What technique dates so precisely? I don't know of any.
No C14 at all surprises me also.
No Doug, I am not rejecting anything of that on a broad basis. Frankly I don't know who Weber is and I used the article to demonstrate the closed mind that tends to exist amongst experts in numerous disciplines.
But when you see statements like the part I underlined both the veracity of the individual, and the cause he represents, are placed under a cloud.
Why, when you catch someone out in a small lie should you not be suspicious of the 'big lie' to follow.
Comments like Weber's do more harm than good, both to archaeology and its practioners.
I had to trawl some original papers recently to discover that our Royal Society, in its report on global warming, has ignored the fact the planet's temperature has fallen for the last eight years and now sits at the 1984 level whilst CO2 levels have risen.
Yes! I am suspicious of all with an axe to grind, and with examples above, I feel fully justified!
Digit wrote:No Doug, I am not rejecting anything of that on a broad basis. Frankly I don't know who Weber is and I used the article to demonstrate the closed mind that tends to exist amongst experts in numerous disciplines.
But when you see statements like the part I underlined both the veracity of the individual, and the cause he represents, are placed under a cloud.
Why, when you catch someone out in a small lie should you not be suspicious of the 'big lie' to follow.
Comments like Weber's do more harm than good, both to archaeology and its practioners.
I had to trawl some original papers recently to discover that our Royal Society, in its report on global warming, has ignored the fact the planet's temperature has fallen for the last eight years and now sits at the 1984 level whilst CO2 levels have risen.
Yes! I am suspicious of all with an axe to grind, and with examples above, I feel fully justified!
But you are generalising. Be suspicious of Weber is you will (although I'm not clear what the lie is), but not of archaeologists. The RS if you will, but not all climatologists who think global warming is made worse by humans.
Beagle wrote:Well, I hope everyone had a nice day. I'm just getting back in. As for the pre-Clovis debate, it's over for me.
At the Topper site this spring, I was shown all the proof I need by one of the Archaeologists working there. Down on the Pleistocene terrace is an excavated hole 15 ft. deep. There - plainly seen - is a dark mass of organic mattter - origin unknown. There is no C14 present in the matter.
Inches below that is a core of chert sticking out of the wall. It bears marks of human workmanship that leave no doubt in the minds of many experts who have examined it. It is dated at 50,300 years old.
I stared at it for some time. This core was , for me, the smoking gun that shot the Clovis First theory dead.
Your a few decades late then. It was over for me long, long ago.
Hm, dated 50,300 years old. What technique dates so precisely? I don't know of any.
No C14 at all surprises me also.
Long over for me as well Doug, it's just nice to stare at the smoking gun. That was my point. Al Goodyear and others determined the minimum date of the artifact based on the few inches of separation between it and the organic matter.
Radioactive decay is measured in half-lives. The half-life of an isotope is the amount of time it takes for half of the substance to decay.
The half-life of carbon-14 is 5730 years. This means that half the carbon 14 in a sample will be gone in 5730 years, and in another 5730 years another half will be gone. In other words, ¾ of the Carbon 14 will be gone in about 11,460 years. Similarly, 7/8 will be gone after about 17,000 years. After 50,000 years, practically all the carbon 14 would have decayed. Thus, any ages greater than 50,000 years cannot be tested with Carbon–14 dating.
To say that all the C14 is gone is common terminology regarding the C14 dating process.
