The Western Hemisphere. General term for the Americas following their discovery by Europeans, thus setting them in contradistinction to the Old World of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Digit wrote:
And in classic Darwinism such separation from the main stock would produce new genetic variations.
Not only would it, Roy, it did: Homo Floresiensis! And proto-indians. And Aboriginals. To name only a few.
Of course all of those were heavily 'diluted' by HE, HH1, HH2, HN, HS, and HSS over the course of the last million years.
Min, check out the last few posts on archchaeology.about forum, levallois in the USA. Kris Hurst and the gang have been silent for quite a while now. There have been a couple lithic expert opinions from england about the indiana and deep south stuff. I sent some artifacts to them to evaluate from a perspective independent of "the club"......rick d.
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.
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.asp ... y&tid=8304 hope this gets you there, look back at the last several posts over the last week. many of the images have been deleted for space but the message from the lithic experts in england are the best parts........rick d.
I did find some of the photos that were still active. From the photos I could see what looked to be a minimum of 3 flakes removed from the points. I simply don't see how nature could produce repetitive strikes on a stone. If a stone falls it may chip once...depending on how far it drops but it isn't going to then climb back up for another fall. If they want to claim that it is the result of freezing I would think that would be a fairly easy experiment to set up. Put some stones in water and freeze and thaw them? Have they tried it I wonder?
Perhaps they don't really wish to see if it works.
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.
The freezing-&-thawing bit is about on a par with "the dog ate my homework" (and my all-time personal favourite, accounting for the edge chipping on the edges of a Clovis blade : "a cow might have stepped on it").
No one familiar with lithic artifacts could take the freezing business seriously for a nanosecond.
I think its just something they say so it doesn't look as if they have no answer.
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.
Water freezing and thawing and freezing in rock cracks will split that rock eventually!
You can try it out in your own deep freezer with a suitably cracked rock in a plastic container with water. Alternate frost with thaw every week and your rock will crack inside a couple years.
Last edited by Rokcet Scientist on Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Rokcet Scientist wrote:Water freezing and thawing and freezing in rock cracks will split that rock eventually!
Yeah, but will it shape it into a stone point?
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.
Of course. that too. But just once. By sheer (geological) coincidence.
And how many of those points and flakes have been amassed by now? 50,000? 100,000?
I remember Charlie's wagon loads...
Counting the ones in private collections like Rick's and Charlie's?
Who the hell knows.
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.
In any case faaaar too many to be a (geological) coincidence! If it were anything geological it would be a state in a(n evolutionary geological) process that would be just as common. Like the formation process of stalagmites and stalagtites. Yet we don't know of such a process producing those hundreds of thousands of points and flakes (if not millions we haven't found yet). We've never observed anything of any such process other than those points... That's pretty thin, imo.
But the chert &/or quartzite that tools were made from ? No. Do that with a chert nodule for 5,000 years and it will still be intact. This mechanism won't even remove the "hanging chads" at the end of of removed flakes on 10,000 year old artifacts. As in, 10,000 years of freezings and thawings. The notion's silly and so far out of line with observed reality in hundreds of thousands of cases it's absurd to advance it with a straight face. My 2 cents worth.
