New North American skeletal remains

[Mikey Brass]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1528019

[Mikey Brass]

I mentioned a day or so ago that an 11kya fossil had been found in North American. A friend has pointed me in the direction of the cultural resource website, with a summary (entitled Pan-Era Woman) & photos of the excavation. In the top right-hand corner is a link entitled "Pan-Era Report"; click on this to download the 27MB file.

http://www.culturalresource.com/pan.html

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Thanks for passing this on. But setting aside, the media "chronological" hype and its expectable caricatural representation of the scientic debate, this find is the first  clear demonstration -- assuming that the date is correct -- that the known Southern Texas Clovis assemblages were indeed made by human beings!

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[lagarvelho]

Jacques and Mikey:

I hope both of you will forgive my profound ignorance on these things(I don't pretend to know much, if anything about early NOrth America), but who or what else could possibly have made these Texas Clovis artifacts?
Anne G

[Su Solomon]

Don't shoot me Ann.  : )

It was an ironic jibe.

A joke!

Cheers,

Su

[Greg]

This does bring up, once again, an interesting question.  The dating may be a little older than Clovis, which could be irrelevant because of vagaries of dating, etc.  But from my own days doing prehistoric research in North America (mainly in the glaciated zone), it always seemed to me likely that there was a commonly present no-fluted point paleo representation even in the Clovis-rich areas.  Site after site seemed to have a non-point or non-typed point presence in a lower level, etc.  

This is not news at all.  The issue of greater interest is this:  Two alternative hypotheses that seem provisionally testable.  One is that Clovis spread across relatively empty areas (see my next post) and the alternative that the practice of using Clovis points (which you could call the Clovis culture if you want, but may be it was just the practice of using Clovis points) spread across an already occupied landscape.

One of the primary pieces of evidence for Clovis First has always been the apparent rapid spread of Clovis one it appears.  The first problem with this is that it is assumed to have been so fast because the radiocarbon dates in the Eastern US seem as old as in the West, where Clovis would have come from given the crossing of the land bridge to Siberia.  This is of course questionable because the earliest Clovis dates were always IN the east, suggesting that Clovis moved in the opposite direction, but since no one will ever believe that I suppose it is not worth bringing up.

The point I want to make here is that the fastest possible spread of the Clovis Culture is across an empty landscape, because a “culture” would encounter resistance if the landscape was already “filled” with people.  However, the fastest possible spread of the Use of Clovis Points (and some other technology) would be across a landscape of people who were already there, because the technology can be adopted from area to area much more quickly than demographic forces can occupy an area.  Clovis practices (as opposed to Clovis people) could spread across all of the known region in a few months to a few years.

[Greg]

In reference to “relatively empty areas” I’d like also to point this out:  The question of the spread of Clovis across relatively empty vs non-empty areas is NOT obviated by the presence of earlier archaeological material at all.  It is still very much an interesting and important question even if there is occupation of the New World at 30K or any other pre-Clovis time.  Minimally, the entire glaciated area was NOT occupied by anyone after the melting of the glaciers, unless they were living on top of the glaciers and fell through the melting slush!  In general, I would bet that much of the new world was not occupied by anyone between the LGM and the Younger Dryas, because of climatic conditions, or thinly occupied.  Even if humans inhabited the new world by ca 30K, it is likely that any early spread and population of certain areas (especially the NA temperate zones) was followed by declines in population.  

This does not mean empty, but it does mean sparse and that I different than a “filled” landscape.

[Greg]

And, just to make sure I’m fully understood here:  I’m not assuming that Clovis would have been an entry/spread into the new world.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I personally harbor the opinion that Clovis emerged from a trans-temperate/sub arctic culture that was perhaps primarily centered in NA and Siberia, and while the members of that group had some interesting and impressive lithic technologies, they sadly lacked the maps necessary to tell them whether they were in the New or Old World. Clovis points sensu stricto may well have originated near Bull Brook or elsewhere in the NE, but that does not mean that the host culture to this point type originated anywhere in particular, only that it existed by then.