Late Pleistocene culturally modified mammoth bones from Kansas

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

In line with my views regarding the age and nature of early human manifestations/dispersals in the New World, and for the record, here are a few interesting words from Kansas.

While the reported dates should not be overly offensive, I am sure Steve Holen’s statement to the effect that “fracture patterns on the bones suggest they were broken by humans who may have been processing them for marrow or to make bone tools,” is likely to baffle many and even elicit strong resistance on the part of quite a few researchers who, unfortunately, it has been shown before, are not very familiar with the technological range that can be exhibited by various types of ancient, Palaeolithic assemblages.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Could Change Dates for Human Arrival on the Great Plains?

Dated by carbon-14 methods at 12,200 years old, recently discovered bones could be the oldest evidence of human occupation in Kansas, and they may be the oldest evidence of humans on the Great Plains.

Source: University of Kansas -- Released: Sat 12-Feb-2005, 09:00 ET

Bones of now-extinct animals and a rock fragment discovered last summer in northwestern Kansas could rewrite the history of humans on the Great Plains.

The bones, which appear to have been fractured by humans, were collected from a site in Sherman County and studied by scientists at the Kansas Geological Survey, the University of Kansas and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Dated by carbon-14 methods at 12,200 years old, the bones could be the oldest evidence of human occupation in Kansas, and they may be the oldest evidence of humans on the Great Plains.

The research was conducted by archaeologist Steven Holen at the Denver Museum, archaeological geologist Rolfe Mandel at the Kansas Geological Survey and archaeologist Jack Hofman at the KU anthropology department.

Scientists previously dated the earliest confirmed evidence of humans on the Great Plains at 11,000 to 11,500 years ago. That was based on mammoth kill sites in western North America, including the first find near Greeley, Colo., excavated by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The new discoveries could challenge that benchmark.

“If we have evidence of people here more than 12,000 years ago, we have to rethink our ideas about human colonization of North America,” said Hofman.

The finds include bones from a now-extinct Ice Age camel and two mammoths. In addition, a rock fragment found with the bones might be a piece of a stone hammer.

“Fracture patterns on the bones suggest they were broken by humans who may have been processing them for marrow or to make bone tools,” said Holen. “The radiocarbon dating shows that these finds are a thousand years older than the best documented evidence of humans on the Great Plains.”

The location was probably a camp site that was occupied for a few days or weeks by a small group of nomadic peoples.

“This location has the potential for shedding new light on the timing of human entry into the Western Hemisphere,” said Mandel. “This could be the oldest site of human activity on the Great Plains.”

In addition to the older material, the site has produced artifacts that are about 10,900 to 11,000 years ago, which scientists refer to as Clovis Age. Those artifacts include stone flakes, tools and pieces of mammoth bone. The material probably represents a hunting camp. Some of the tools were made of stone from the Texas panhandle, suggesting the group was highly mobile.

“Clovis materials have been found in Kansas before, but usually on gravel bars along streams,” said Mandel. “This site represents the first central Great Plains discovery of Clovis-period stone tools that are still in place.”

The fact that both Clovis-age material and possible pre-Clovis material were found at the same location is probably no accident, say the scientists.

“Something, probably water, kept attracting people back to this location,” said Mandel. “There were likely seeps and springs here that attracted game animals, and then people, to this spot.

“These people were always on the move. That's why archaeological material from them is so sparse, and why this location is so important.”

Mammoth bone at the site was originally discovered in 1976 and excavated in the 1970s and 1980s by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The recently discovered materials were recovered during digs in the summers of 2003 and 2004, conducted jointly by the Kansas Geological Survey and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The work was supported by the Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund, an endowed program at KU with a directive to search for the earliest evidence of humans in the Great Plains.

Additional excavations are scheduled for summer 2005.

For photos related to the story, click HERE.

© Newswise.

[AWSX]

Jacques,
Over on the eastern side of Kansas human bones mixed in with extinct pleistocene fauna were discovered years ago. Unfortunately they were found in a gravel bar on the Kaw River so the context was questionable and the human bones were so heavily mineralized that no C14 dating was possible. Several partial crania and long bones were recovered. The femora were quite robust  and one had part of a projectile point imbedded. Some of the bones showed cut marks and the crania showed some evidence of cultural modification.

It has taken me nearly a year to track down a reference on this discovery but finally a helpful grad student at KU came to my aid.
The only reference found so far is "Human Skeletal Remains Recovered from the Bonner Springs Locality, Northeastern Kansas" by D. Gentry Steele, Joseph F. Powell, Larry D. Martin, and Wakefield Dort, Jr. published in Current Research in the Pleistocene Volume 8, 1991. (unfortunately it is not online, but I do have a copy)

I did look through the table of contents on later issues of CRP and noticed a masters thesis on the same subject and that will be my next quest.

Allan Shumaker

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dear Allan,

Thanks for the info and looking forward to hearing from you about this thesis. I'll also try to find out about more about this story and, if something comes up, I'll pass it around.

Jacques

[AWSX]

I received a copy of "A Comparative Study of Paleoindian Evidence at The Bonner Springs Locality, Lower Kansas River Basin, Kansas " by Bert Wetherill  which was his 1995 Masters Thesis.  I have not had time to read through it yet (over 100 pages) but it deals with the classification of projectile points from several collections. Nothing older than Clovis is mentioned.

Here is a link to a short article on the "Kanarado site" which will be published in the KU Anthropology Newsletter. http://www.kshs.org/resource/katpcurrent.htm

The dig will continue this summer with funding provided by Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund which is charged with looking for the earliest people in the Central Great Plains (pre-Clovis).  Digging will also resume this summer on the "Claussen site" near Paxaco, Kansas. Last year there was hope that they might have found a rather unique pre-Clovis site but the C14 dates placed it in early Holocene at 9000BP. Some group camped on the creek and left stone tools made from local rock along with remains of turkey, deer, mussel shells and fish. I have a small .pdf summary of the sites investigated so far.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

I received a copy of "A Comparative Study of Paleoindian Evidence at The Bonner Springs Locality, Lower Kansas River Basin, Kansas " by Bert Wetherill  which was his 1995 Masters Thesis.  I have not had time to read through it yet (over 100 pages) but it deals with the classification of projectile points from several collections. Nothing older than Clovis is mentioned.

Here is a link to a short article on the "Kanarado site" which will be published in the KU Anthropology Newsletter. http://www.kshs.org/resource/katpcurrent.htm

The dig will continue this summer with funding provided by Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund which is charged with looking for the earliest people in the Central Great Plains (pre-Clovis).  Digging will also resume this summer on the "Claussen site" near Paxaco, Kansas. Last year there was hope that they might have found a rather unique pre-Clovis site but the C14 dates placed it in early Holocene at 9000BP. Some group camped on the creek and left stone tools made from local rock along with remains of turkey, deer, mussel shells and fish. I have a small .pdf summary of the sites investigated so far.

Dear Allen,

Thanks for this info -- especially the short article on the "Karanado site". It was nice to read that Steven Holen is still looking for pre-Clovis material which is what interests me most in this whole story.

Jacques

[Daryl Habel]

An update today on Steven Holen's Paleoindian site, gleaned from David Meadows' Explorator Newsletter.  There's not much here that hasn't been reported earlier in this thread, but the story does note that work is now in progress (June 4-19) at the Sherman County (western Kansas) site. See:CLICK HERE

Dar

[AWSX]

Here is another news article from the KU Newsletter.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/jun/12/kanorado/?ku_news

Now this article contains an interesting statement attributed to Holen:

While the artifacts from 10,800 to 11,500 years ago are interesting, workers digging near Kanorado clearly would like to find something to push back dates of humans in the Great Plains — and thus make history themselves.

If such an artifact was found, the researchers say, it would raise questions about whether the earliest inhabitants of North America came across the Bering Strait from Asia. Instead, they may have arrived by boat in South America, and journeyed northward.

That, Holen said, would fly in the face of scientific doctrine that has long held humans have been in North America for about 11,500 years.

“There is a strong contingent that still believes that,” he said. “We’re going to do what we can to disprove that.”

Now the 'coastal migration route' seems to be gaining support but has anyone proposed first arrival in South America?

Allan Shumaker

[Daryl Habel]

Here is another news article from the KU Newsletter.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/jun/12/kanorado/?ku_news

Allan,

Thanks for this - the KU Newsletter seems to be the place to check in for news from Kanorado.  I think I'll be passing through near Lawrence on my way West this year, but that won't happen until late July and their dig would be finished by then.  But just to take a look at the geography with the 12,200 rcyr BP site in mind should be helpful (to me) and maybe I'll try to locate the approximate site and pass by.

Now the 'coastal migration route' seems to be gaining support but has anyone proposed first arrival in South America?

Allan Shumaker

I suppose someone (somewhere, sometime) has proposed this, but I think, for the most part, even the proponents of very early South African [correction 06/15/05: should read "South American"] colonization (pre-20 ka) adhere to the Beringian hypothesis (in some form or another).  If you follow that line of thought, one has to wonder why nobody ever colonized the Columbia-Upper Missouri River system, which always looked like an excellent Clovis-entry route to the Great Plains (not ignoring possible earlier colonizers, of course).

That is a strange conclusion to make from the evidence only of human modification of a few bones.    

Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Here is another news article from the KU Newsletter.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/jun/12/kanorado/?ku_news

Now this article contains an interesting statement attributed to Holen:

While the artifacts from 10,800 to 11,500 years ago are interesting, workers digging near Kanorado clearly would like to find something to push back dates of humans in the Great Plains — and thus make history themselves.

If such an artifact was found, the researchers say, it would raise questions about whether the earliest inhabitants of North America came across the Bering Strait from Asia. Instead, they may have arrived by boat in South America, and journeyed northward.

That, Holen said, would fly in the face of scientific doctrine that has long held humans have been in North America for about 11,500 years.

“There is a strong contingent that still believes that,” he said. “We’re going to do what we can to disprove that.”

Now the 'coastal migration route' seems to be gaining support but has anyone proposed first arrival in South America?

Allan Shumaker

Thanks for bringing this up, but, as usual, media reports of this kind should be taken with many grains of salt.

Putting aside the obvious hype regarding “making history, this piece is likely to misrepresents, unwillingly, I am sure,, whatever Holen had to say about the actual significance of a “find” that would “push back dates of humans in the Great Plains”. I f you really want to find out about his actual position on this, have a look at the following recent paper on the La Sena and Lovewell finds (HERE). In it, you will see that he and others have already documented evidence of “humans in the Great Plains” that predates the end of the Late Glacial, Furthermore, he does not feel a need, in order to explain the evidence, to bring up some specious human dispersal scenario that flies in the face of the one and only scientifically credible parsimonious hypothesis we can (should), at this time, come up with. And the evidence, I am referring to indicates clearly that the true New World “founding fathers and mothers” originated (somewhere in) Northeast Asia and, through a (likely) very slow and complex dispersal process, moved (somewhere) across Beringia, and slowly south from there. All other explanations people have come up with so far are either unadulterated, delusional gobbledygook or suffer from a rather obvious lack of evidence (as in the case of the proposed “Pacific coast” solution.

In other words, Dar was essentially right when he said, in his earlier note, that:

... I think, for the most part, even the proponents of very early South African [correction 06/15/05: should read "South American"] colonization (pre-20 ka) adhere to the Beringian hypothesis (in some form or another).

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

<snip>

I suppose someone (somewhere, sometime) has proposed this, but I think, for the most part…

Dar,

I don’t have the exact reference in hand, but Jim Dixon did come up with such a proposal in the early or mid- 80s, if I recall. Note that the reference to this particular paper does not seem to be listed in his recent Bones, Boats & Bisons.

even the proponents of very early South African [correction 06/15/05: should read "South American"] colonization (pre-20 ka) adhere to the Beringian hypothesis (in some form or another).  If you follow that line of thought, one has to wonder why nobody ever colonized the Columbia-Upper Missouri River system, which always looked like an excellent Clovis-entry route to the Great Plains (not ignoring possible earlier colonizers, of course).

Your geographical bias is showing, here! But seriously, I don’t think we are in a position to state unequivocally that “nobody ever colonized the Columbia-Upper Missouri River system,”. We just don’t know and, as you well know, absence of …. Many reasons can be put forth to explain such an apparent “absence", but, for the time being, I’ll limit myself to an interesting archaeological analogy. Think of what the Siberian Yana discovery is likely to do to one's appreciation of human adaptive capabilities in northeasternmost Siberia and beyond, prior to the onset of the LGM.

That is a strange conclusion to make from the evidence only of human modification of a few bones.

Dar

Apologies if I misunderstand you, here, but would you, by any chance, be suggesting that culturally modified bones (identified as such thanks to increasingly strict standards and corollary expertise) which can be securely dated (14C and/or chronostratigraphic evidence) are not to be taken seriously as solid evidence (reliable signals) of ancient human presence? If so, have a look at the Holen’s article I mentioned in my earlier response to Allan, and give special attention to some of the references listed therein.

Jacques

[Daryl Habel]

Jacques,

I guess you did misunderstand or else I was not clear.  Yes, culturally modified bones indicates human presence.  But I was referring to the conclusion that these early arrivals who modified the bones came from South America.  I don't follow the reasoning that if pre-Clovis people are present on the Great Plains, as shown by the culturally modified bones, then this evidence somehow shows they came from South America.  This is what I find strange.

Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dar, Allan, and others

If you are interested, here are two additional papers that are directly relevant to many aspects of the ongoing exchange:

Arroro-Cabrales, J., O.J. Polaco, and E. Johnson. 2005. A preliminary view of the coexistence of mammoth and earlypeoples in México. Quaternary International (in press).

Abstract:
A progress report about human–mammoth interactions in Mexico is provided based primarily on a literature search. More than 270 mammoth localities are known in Mexico, but only 17 of them have shown some evidence of an association between early peoples and mammoth. However, that number is even less when each locality is assessed in detail, due to the lack of a supportable association or the loss of the actual specimens that precludes their analysis using current techniques. Only six localities have modifieded mammoth bone. Among them, the greatest potential for demonstrating such a relationship is at Santa Isabel Iztapa, Valsequillo, Villa de Guadalupe, and Tocuila. Establishing an analysis methodology for the materials from those, as well as new localities, is warranted to provide the basis for interpreting the human–mammoth relationship in Mexico. Future research calls for detailed stratigraphic and radiometric control and an analytical protocol for bone analysis focused on taphonomy and biotechnology.

Click HERE for the full article.

Johnson, Eileen. 2005. The taphonomy of mammoth localities in southeastern Wisconsin (USA). Quaternary International (in press)

Abstract:
Four southeastern Wisconsin mammoth localities located within a glacial landscape had well-preserved remains found in intermorainal depressions filled with lacustrine clays covered with peat. Numerous radiocarbon ages dated the mammoths to the late Pleistocene. The taphonomic analysis focused on determining the agency or agencies involved in site formation and the agency or agencies involved in modification to the bones. Statistical approaches to bone orientation data underscored that water transport was not a factor in the formation of the bone beds nor was water movement a disturbance factor. The bone modification profile of the overall assemblage was dominated by chemical weathering, followed by other chemical and microbiological processes. Root etching was the most common biological modification, and the most frequent modi•cations are involved with the microenvironments of the surface to burial substrate. Potentially cultural modification accounted for only a small portion of the cortical damage to the bones. This general profile indicated an assemblage far more influenced by the immediate environment than by passing animals or people.

Click HERE for the full article.

Jacques.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Jacques,

I guess you did misunderstand or else I was not clear.  Yes, culturally modified bones indicates human presence.  But I was referring to the conclusion that these early arrivals who modified the bones came from South America.  I don't follow the reasoning that if pre-Clovis people are present on the Great Plains, as shown by the culturally modified bones, then this evidence somehow shows they came from South America.  This is what I find strange.

Dar

Dar,

Thanks for the clarification. It was obviously a misunderstanding on my part. It happens, you know, when one tries arduously to cope with the intricacies of a foreign language!

There is nothing strange about gobbledegook. We are subjected to the stuff everyday, in the news (scientific or not). And that's what that statement must be all about.

By definition, the people who left in various areas of the Great Plains the culturally modified bones "signatures" we are talking about had to “emanate” from farther north, i.e., Beringia and, originally, northeasternmost Eurasia. It is, parsimoniously again, as simple as that. And if some say that this is impossible to envision because of the recent "debunking" of the long lived Mackenzie Corridor concept, I'll just note, evidence in hand, that human groups were in easternmost Beringia prior to the so-called closure of said Corridor. This should then take care of the time slope problem. Not to mention that I am definitely not ready to buy into this “Closure” thing as recently put forth by a number of geologists, geoarchaeologists, palaeoecologists, and their archaeological repeating stations. I think one could readily come up with serious anthropological, ethnographical, biogeographical, and palaeoecological evidence or, at least reservations indicating or suggesting that this conclusion is, unfortunately -- but expectable on the New World palaeo scene -- quite dogmatic.

Jacques

[AWSX]

Another update on Kanorado from the RockyMountainNews:
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3865433,00.html

Apparently they found at least one more large bone in the final days of this years dig.

[Robert Henvell]

The high incidence of Folsom sites in the mountains is of interest.Has anyone sighted any additional information on this topic?