Here We Go Again

[uniface]

Stone tools unearthed at a Brazilian rock-shelter may date to as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery has rekindled debate about whether ancient people reached the Americas long before the famed Clovis hunters spread through parts of North America around 13,000 years ago.

Among other South American locations proposed as human settlements well before North America’s Clovis culture, the most controversial is Brazil’s Pedra Furada rock-shelter. There, archaeologists unearthed burned wood and sharp-edged stones and dated them to more than 50,000 years ago. Pedra Furada’s excavators regard the finds as evidence of ancient human hearths and stone tools. Critics, and especially many Clovis investigators, say the Brazilian discoveries could have resulted from natural fires and rock slides.

The new discovery came at Toca da Tira Peia rock-shelter, which is in the same national park as Pedra Furada. It also has drawn skeptics. The site’s location at the base of a steep cliff raises the possibility that crude, sharp-edged stones resulted from falling rocks, not human handiwork, says archaeologist Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada, Reno. Another possibility is that capuchins or other monkeys produced the tools, says archaeologist Stuart Fiedel of Louis Berger Group, an environmental consulting firm in Richmond, Va.

The age of Toca da Tira Peia artifacts has also drawn debate. Dating the artifacts hinges on calculations of how long ago objects were buried by soil. Various environmental conditions, including fluctuations in soil moisture, could have distorted these age estimates, Haynes says.

But archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville has seen some of the Toca da Tira Peia finds and regards them as human-made implements. Similar tools have been unearthed at sites in Chile and Peru, Dillehay says. His team previously estimated that people settled Chile’s Monte Verde site by 14,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 33,000 years ago.

An absence of burned wood or other finds suitable for radiocarbon dating at Toca da Tira Peia is a problem, because that’s the standard method for estimating the age of sites up to around 40,000 years ago, Dillehay says. But if people reached South America by 20,000 years ago, “this is the type of archaeological record we might expect: ephemeral and lightly scattered material in local shelters.”

Lahaye and Boëda’s team excavated Toca da Tira Peia from 2008 to 2011. Digging turned up 113 stone artifacts consisting of tools and tool debris in five soil layers. Using a technique that measures natural radiation damage in excavated quartz grains, the scientists estimated that the last exposure of soil to sunlight ranged from about 4,000 years ago in the top layer to 22,000 years ago in the third layer.

Lahaye says that 15 human-altered stones from the bottom two soil layers must be older than 22,000 years. The researchers plan to calculate when those artifacts were buried.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... _years_ago

[hardaker]

They Just Don't Die!!! They Never Die!!! They always have been!!! And Always Will Be!!! They are Zombies!!! Zombies For Clovis. Run!!! Run!!!

"“You can’t outrun them, you can’t destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually, you will weaken—your reserves will be gone. They are relentless.”"

Run anyway!!!

"The new discovery came at Toca da Tira Peia rock-shelter, which is in the same national park as Pedra Furada. It also has drawn skeptics. The site’s location at the base of a steep cliff raises the possibility that crude, sharp-edged stones resulted from falling rocks, not human handiwork, says archaeologist Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada, Reno. Another possibility is that capuchins or other monkeys produced the tools, says archaeologist Stuart Fiedel of Louis Berger Group, an environmental consulting firm in Richmond, Va.

The age of Toca da Tira Peia artifacts has also drawn debate. Dating the artifacts hinges on calculations of how long ago objects were buried by soil. Various environmental conditions, including fluctuations in soil moisture, could have distorted these age estimates, Haynes says."

[hardaker]

okay, i'm calm. waterfalls and butterflies.
Falling rocks and monkeyfacts. Either these two guys think they are the only people on earth who can gauge lithics and site formation processes, or they are simply racist/ethnocentric. I don't see any way around it. waterfalls ...

[Minimalist]

The site’s location at the base of a steep cliff raises the possibility that crude, sharp-edged stones resulted from falling rocks,

And then, of course, the rocks climbed back to the top of the cliff so they could throw themselves off and flake the other side.......

Another possibility is that capuchins or other monkeys produced the tools,

I saw that movie when I was a kid. Go have a beer, Chris. Get your blood pressure back to normal.

[hardaker]

That's the problem. The ol' blood pressure has been ramped up for about a decade now because I learned that my academic "betters" did not give a damn about science, but only proving themselves right at the expense of the awesome realities that are New World Archaeology but did not fit the extremely tight limitations of what my "betters" saw fit as politically correct subjects to pursue through graduate studies or through granting agencies. After more than 40 years of contract archaeology alone, every new archaeologist's heart should tremble at what we missed because we were ordered that nothing prior to Clovis existed, and that if you looked for it, you could not be trusted nor taken seriously. And so, during those decades of work, no preClovis sites were ever reported, nor were any honorable/professional grants doled out to investigate the subject, nor any doled out to examine the feasibility of Pleistocene maritime connections, like maybe out in the West Coast's Channel Islands like Santa Rosa Is. Now it is absolutely certain that pre-Clovis horizons exist. And on the East Coast, the Solutrean diffusion is fairly certain. But these scared little minions who have come to be regarded as "experts" are little more that priests warning others not to look behind the curtain if they value their careers, still. And all the while, the wonders of our species' exploits in the New World, like Valsequillo, are academically treated like the plague. So the blood pressure will probably remain what it is, and I will continue to cry over what has been missed and avoided by my "profession." It goes with the job. But I will get a beer; hell, maybe a keg.

[Cognito]

Gary Haynes and Stuart Feidel ... it is amazing that anyone bothers to listen to those two anymore. They stubbornly hang onto Clovis First in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary. Some religions never die.

[E.P. Grondine]

I really don't have the time to deal with this endless bs, as I have to deal with entirely too much of it from the g*d d*****d f******g
Mars Nuts. In fact an endless stream of bs, in fact. And then there's the Nu ager's nonsense.

People believe what they want to believe, and will conveniently dismiss or try to rationalize away any facts that interfere with those beliefs.

[Minimalist]

Mars Nuts?


Sounds like a candy bar, E.P.