Archaeologica.org

Have just posted this on my forum.

Calico in California



The history books may need to be completely rewritten on when man first entered the Americas if some 50,000 year old bones from Calico in California turn out to be human.

Until now, there’s been something of stand-off in this debate between what are known as Clovis and Pre-Clovis supporters, which centres around dates of between 9,000 and 14,000 years ago.

But these bones at Calico Early Man archaeological site could blow that debate out of the water.

The bones were originally found at Calico between 1963 and 1972, when the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey was in charge, and they have been locked away in a vault ever since.

Louis Leakey


Because of the depth of the strata in which they were discovered, they are thought to be around 45-55,000 years old, but they haven’t yet been carbon dated.

Now a Native American geologist has written to Calico asking for the bones to be brought out of the vault and tested to determine their age and whether or not they’re human, which she has the right to do under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Ren Lallatin, a Mohawk Cherokee Choctaw, has been researching at the Calico site for the past four years. She is insisting that the bones be examined through an independent and impartial research facility, and not the ‘biased personnel’ of a local museum.

Of particular interest is a large bone ~ four inches long and one inch wide ~ which is still partially embedded in the matrix, and which is thought to be human.

It will be interesting to see how events develop.

A story about this has just been published in the Pleistocene Coalition News, Volume 3, Issue 1, January-February 2011 which has more details. Go to the Pleistocene Coalition website.

Really not feeling this one so much. Sediment dating can be impacted by a lot of variables.

I do find this location interesting because from time to time in my youth I was known to frequent the high desert around this area during my exhaustive research into sex, nudity, and drug use at high desert hot springs.

So the archaeologist is Mohawk Cherokee Choctaw? Does she get a piece of all those casinos?

Ishtar wrote:The history books may need to be completely rewritten on when man first entered the Americas if some 50,000 year old bones from Calico in California turn out to be human.

And again when hominids' 500 KYA presence in the Americas will be confirmed.

a Mohawk Cherokee Choctaw

His mom got around!

Rokcet, 'he' is a 'she'.

Barracuda, I agree ... they could turn out to be animal bones, too.

But what sparked my interest is that they were kept locked in a vault for 40 years. It's almost drawing attention to them, in a way.

Knowing something of the pressure Louis Leakey was under at Calico to keep his dates in-line with the status quo, which is a practice that goes on there to this day, one wonders if he just locked away this bone to spare himself further brain damage?

Anyway, whether she owns or casinos or not ~ under NAGPRA, normally the bane of an archaeologist's life, Ren has the right to ask for the bones to be examined properly, which they haven't been so far.

Ishtar wrote:Rokcet, 'he' is a 'she'.

Same difference.

50,000 years is getting pretty close to the limit of C14 dating however it would be consistent with Goodyear's work at Topper. By all means, test them and find out of they are human or animal. Then we can worry about "when."

She's already got that covered, Min.

Here's an extract from her letter to the Friends and Directors of Calico, with a list of what she wants them to do:

1) Identify the bones as to genus and species, if possible. Are there Miocene-aged reworked Barstow Formation fossil species?
2) Determine, for certain, whether or not DNA tests are possible on the bones, especially the large, greenstick fractured bone still partially imbedded in matrix
3) Date, using 14C, on especially the large, embedded, greenstick-fractured bone
4) If the 14C age of the big bone or any other humanbone exceeds the outer~45,000 year reliability of 14C dating, resort to other dating methods to determine reliable dates for the bone.
5) If the big bone, or any other of the bones are human, instigate the proper legal dialogues with the BLM and the tribes in compliancewith Native American repatriation laws.

The longer this is delayed for 40 years since the bones’ recovery, and especially with the big bone locked in the vault and hidden away, the more suspicious this looks. The more the bones are not addressed, the more negligent everybody is, including FOC, SBCM and the BLM.

I am asking you now to finally address the bones and care for them in the proper scientific and legal ways. Deal with the bones once and for all, and let the scientific, legal and social facts, not opinions or excuses, speak for themselves. After
40 years of being hidden out of sight and dismissed as "irrelevant" and "inconvenient" or "too expensive", the true facts, hard data and legal realities of my ancestor's bodies deserve to be heard, whatever the outcomes may be.

I will ask the FOC Board for a written copy of the full report on the bones at the public Friends of Calico general membership meeting,

There is also a reply from the other side with an even longer list of demands of what they require from her in order to release them. If anyone wants to a pdf of the PC News, from which this comes, please PM me with your email address.

So they are human! So does that make them Native American within the Act?
What if they turned out be HSN?
Or Negroid?

Roy.

Ishtar wrote:If anyone wants to a pdf of the PC News, from which this comes, please PM me with your email address.

Install 'DropBox' (https://www.dropbox.com/) on your computer. Then everytime you want to share a file (including big-uns) you simply drop it into your DropBox, you copy the provided 'public URL', and post that URL here on the board.
Anybody who wants that file simply clicks on it to download it.

Example:
video Human Planet - People of the Trees (213,8MB) - download from http://tinyurl.com/638mmte.

Digit wrote:So they are human! So does that make them Native American within the Act?
What if they turned out be HSN?
Or Negroid?

Roy.

Yeah, that's the problem. Modern tribes claim any bones as their ancestors....even if those bones are thousands of years old and the tribes were forcibly resettled onto those lands in the late 19th century.

Yes, exactly.

What's ironic is that NAGRPA, usually the bane of archaeologists, in this case could turn out to advance the cause of archaeology.

However, they could just as likely be animal bones, and maybe that's why the powers-that-be at Calico haven't tested them. After all, testing is a very expensive and time consuming procedure. So you'd have to be pretty sure of the outcome before committing your scarce funding to it.

FYI, Dig.

http://www.archaeology.org/9701/etc/specialreport.html

Note this quote:

Asserting that the remains were an ancestor's, the four tribes and a fifth Indian group, the Wanapum, filed a joint claim for them. Referring to the skeleton in a tribal position paper, Umatilla trustee and religious leader Armand Minthorn wrote,

If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time....

Sounds like the kind of thing that could be written by any fundie, any where!

A prime example of circular thinking that is Min.

Roy.

I keep this handy for use at Atheistforums.org. You wouldn't believe how many times it has had to be used.

I like that!

Roy.