Dr. Michael Collins
Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:51 pm
This guy completely fascinates me:
Collin's was one of the first respected preClovis advocates.Archeologist digs up new truths in Central Texas
Dr. Michael Collins, a research associate at the University’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL), has discovered some fascinating artifacts during his career. He has also discovered that old archeological theories can be as hard to break as the rock that holds those artifacts. After years of dedicated research, Collins has amassed substantial evidence to challenge 20th-century scientific thought on the origins of humankind in the Americas.
The saga began in 1990 with a phone call from a fossil-casting expert in Illinois. The man told Collins that an archeological antiquities collector had asked him to cast copies of some prehistoric spearheads and engraved stones unearthed at a site in Central Texas. The location, now known as the Gault site, had been plundered for years by collectors looking for ancient artifacts. The spearheads and stones were special because they indicated that the earliest known inhabitants of the Americas, known as the Clovis people, lived on the site between 12,500 and 13,500 years ago.
Things got really interesting a few years later when the Gault site changed hands and the new owners conducted their own dig. Uncovering the mandible of a mammoth and knowing they could not remove the find without destroying it, they called Collins. By then, he knew the site was rich with archeological information. Even though collectors had removed evidence of the last 9,000 years of human existence at the location, they hadn’t dug far enough to get to the era of the Clovis people. Collins and TARL were able to lease 34 acres of the site for three years, and in that time they roughly doubled the number of Clovis-era artifacts excavated to date in North America.
Recovered from the Gault site in Bell County, these tools were used by humans thousands of years ago to kill game, cut wood, and gather food.
Click here for larger image.
The artifacts tell a story far different from accepted thought on the earliest dwellers in the Americas. Until Gault, most archeologists subscribed to what is known as the Clovis First Theory, which holds that the first humans in the Americas arrived here some 13,500 years ago, making their way from Siberia to Alaska by walking over a now submerged land bridge in the Bering Strait. These migrating peoples traveled down a narrow corridor between two towering ice sheets into the Great Plains, which were teeming with prey, and began populating the Americas as a highly mobile, game hunting people.
Researchers began poking holes in the Clovis First Theory in the late 1970s with the discovery of the Monte Verde site in Southern Chile. Collins, who was associated with that project for more than 20 years, says Monte Verde’s inhabitants were settled tent dwellers and not nomads. Carbon dating indicates they lived there about 14,500 years ago, a thousand years earlier than the Clovis First Theory postulates.
Then came the Gault site, which Collins describes as “the poster child for debunking the Clovis First Theory. You couldn’t have designed a more perfect site.” Archeological excavation there — led by teams from TARL — shows that rather than being specialized, roaming mammoth hunters, Gault’s Clovis inhabitants lived at the site off and on for 200 to 300 years. They used stone tools to kill game, cut meat, work hide, and gather plants.
Clovis First has suffered other blows. The latest scientific studies show that the ice-free corridor into the Americas probably didn’t appear before 12,000 years ago. And because of Monte Verde and several digs in North America, Collins says, “we now believe people arrived in the Americas considerably earlier than we once thought — perhaps as long ago as 20,000 years.”
How they got here remains uncertain. But Collins and others believe the first Americans likely arrived by boat, and the scenarios vary as to how this happened. “Gault is having its intended effect and the Clovis First Theory is becoming less and less defensible,” says Collins. “But when you dismantle a paradigm, you’ve got to replace it. We’ve got a long way to go in formulating a new theory.”
The questions that must be answered, he says, are who were the first Americans, when did they get here, where did they come from, and how did they arrive? “When we answer these questions, our answers have to withstand the scrutiny of archeologists, human biologists, linguists, geologists, oceanographers, and paleoclimatologists,” he says. “We’ve got a big order.”
Much of the work done by Collins and his team of six researchers and scores of volunteers has come from private philanthropy. In fact, Collins’ father Walter, an independent oil and gas man who died in January, was a significant contributor. “He got me interested in archeology when I was a child,” Collins says, recalling that the two collected spearheads and other artifacts and studied them together. “He worked in his oil and gas office almost until the day he died at the age of 98. He was a pretty remarkable guy.”
