Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
True Digit, but if I came in here, with a leap of faith and state (which I do believe) that the Genesis account of the flood and the Sumerian flood epic were both redactions of a common earlier, oral account, you guys would line up from end of the board to the other to slap me.
However, the scientific method does not allow for speculation
But mounting evidence is slowly turning that story to fiction, said Michael Collins, an archaeologist with the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
For more than 20 years, Collins and other scientists have been digging up artifacts from Chile to Texas that convince them the first Americans didn't walk here at all, but came by boat, and arrived much earlier than previously thought.
Digit, speculation is not part of the scientific method unless it is formed as a hypothesis. I see nothing wrong with it as long as it is overtly admitted as such and not interlaced with established evidence. And I am in the same boat as Charlie ... a pre-Clovis site which apparently dates to 16,000bce or earlier. It could be as old as 50,000bce or more. I don't know. To make matters more confusing someone was producing Acheulean hand axes at that site. That technology is far older. There's nothing wrong with speculating that a form of H. erectus made the tools, but there is no evidence. Until bones are found, it is simply speculation. The makers could have been archaic H. sapiens instead. When bones are found, we should know who made the tools. Until then, it's a nice chat by the fire.I cannot see how you can remove speculation from science.
FM, yes. It's easy to tell the difference. That's why the tools can be taken to archaeologists in Europe and they'll tell you they're Acheulean, etc. until it's mentioned they came from America ... then, they clam up. The technology of production doesn't lie, but there is no accepted chronology for ancient hominids in the Americas and you would be getting the same result by telling them the tools were left by Atlantean spaceships from Alpha Centauri.Am I naive or can a 'professional' archaelogist NOT tell the difference between a rock and a tool?
Until bones are found, it is simply speculation.
Actually, my motivation is curiosity as opposed to speculation. For me, it is a problem unsolved, an answer to the question, "Who made these?" to which the answer is, "Nobody knows." Speculation, although loads of fun, will only bring bias to the situation for me at this point. And that, might I add, is how we got here in the first place.It is the speculation that fires the mind. If you did not have the tool would you be looking for bones?
Digit, the first part is definitely correct. Clovis does not resemble anything being found in Siberia. However, the second part is close. There are bifacial tools in China similar to the Acheulean tradition that have been recently discovered; however, those are very primitive compared to Clovis. Fred Budinger believes the Calico tools are similar to those found in China from 300,000 years ago (with bifacials) and believes they will eventually find H. erectus remains. I cannot tell you when bifacial working made its way to China, but it appears to have originated to the west.So is the evidence of the tooling Cog. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it the stone tooling of NE Asia is micro-lith based, whereas Clovis obviously isn't. In fact the home of bi-facial working seems not to be in Asia at all. Am I correct?
"Who made these?"
