A Pre-Clovis Site on Chesapeake Bay

WaPoo, Ancient Chesapeake site challenges timeline of humans in the Americas 

“I was a weirdo kid,” he recalled. He trained as a geologist, and it was geology that initially attracted Lowery to study Parsons Island.

In 2010, he published an article in Quaternary Science Reviews describing layers of windblown silt deposited between 13,000 and 41,000 years ago at Miles Point in eastern Maryland. But the geological record is like reading the CliffsNotes version of a book, and he was frustrated by an “unconformity” in the sediment layers where thousands of years were missing, like someone had ripped out those chapters.

Lowery and a colleague were prowling around in a boat, looking for a spot that might fill in the blanks, when they spotted a black streak of sediment rising up out of the bay. They pulled up to Parsons Island and thought they had found “the Rosetta stone” to decode the geology.

Parsons is a 78-acre island less than a mile offshore that is privately owned by the Corckran family, which uses it as a family retreat. With the Corckrans’ permission, Lowery and colleagues began to visit regularly. The bluff layers preserved a remarkably intact geologic timeline going back more than 40,000 years.

Then, one morning in August 2013, the team discovered a leaf-shaped prehistoric stone tool jutting out of this crumbling wall. They knew from the work they’d already done that it was probably quite old.

On a recent visit to the island, geoarchaeologist Daniel Wagner demonstrated why. He stepped back to scan the cliff, then tapped a narrow spade into a light tan sediment layer just above his head. That, he said, is the geologic “chapter” where they’d expect to find Clovis artifacts. Lower layers were set down before Clovis.

The palm-size tool Lowery and his colleague found came out of the dark sediment layer near their knees.

The scientists used two methods to date the sediment around the artifact, both showing it was more than 20,000 years old. They scoured the beach on 93 visits and conducted a formal, top-down excavation, collecting the 286 artifacts. They sent out sediment to labs that specialize in studying ancient pollen and microfossils called phytoliths to help reconstruct the ecosystem at the time.

Back then, this region wouldn’t have been a coastline. The sediment the tools are embedded in dates to the “last glacial maximum” — the scientific term for the most recent coldest period of the Ice Age. In the final analysis, Lowery thinks the artifacts may have been transported downslope before they were buried, making them between 15,000 and 20,500 years old.

At the time of the last glacial maximum there would have been no Chesapeake Bay, merely the Susquehanna River running down what is now the main channel of Chesapeake, out across the continental shelf and into the Atlantic. Parsons Island, would have been a fair distance back from the river, although  there would have likely been nearby streams. 

“This was a swale, where water was collecting,” Lowery said, envisioning the ancient landscape. “You’ve got a dune. It’s got sedges and small trees on it that are windblown and all contorted, and then behind it you’ve got a little pond.”

That pond may have attracted prehistoric bison, musk oxen and llamas, whose fossilized molars he’s found scattered on the island shore. And it may have been what attracted the mysterious people who left behind a cache of stone tools.

The Clovis-first hypothesis has been pretty well busted for quite a while now, but evidence of a Pre-Clovis community in the Bay region certainly expands they're range. It's still an open question whether the Pre-Clovis population had much genetic contribution to the Native American population present when Europeans arrived. Did they suffer an extinction, or near extinction event at the Younger Dryas? We're they largely conquered and wiped out by the more recent Native Americans after they crossed the Bering Straight, or merely intermingled in the population? 

But How Did They Taste?

Live Science, Humans were in South America at least 25,000 years ago, giant sloth bone pendants reveal

The date that humans arrived in South America has been pushed back to at least 25,000 years ago, based on an unlikely source: bones from an extinct giant ground sloth that were crafted into pendants by ancient people.

Discovered in the Santa Elina rock shelter in central Brazil, three sloth osteoderms — bony deposits that form a kind of protective armor over the skin of animals such as armadillos — found near stone tools sported tiny holes that only humans could have made.

The finding is among the earliest evidence for humans in the Americas, according to a paper published Wednesday (July 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The Santa Elina rock shelter, located in the Mato Grosso state in central Brazil, has been studied by archaeologists since 1985. Previous research at the site noted the presence of more than 1,000 individual figures and signs drawn on the walls, hundreds of stone tool artifacts, and thousands of sloth osteoderms, with three of the osteoderms showing evidence of human-created drill holes.

Ground Sloth osteoderm with drill hole

The newly published study documents these sloth osteoderms in exquisite detail to show that it is extremely unlikely that the holes in the bones were made naturally, with the implication that these bones push back the date humans settled in Brazil to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago. These dates are significant because of the growing — but still controversial — evidence for very early human occupation in South America, such as a date of 22,000 years ago for the Toca da Tira Peia rock shelter in eastern Brazil.

Using a combination of microscopic and macroscopic visualization techniques, the team discovered that the osteoderms, and even their tiny holes, had been polished, and noted traces of stone tool incisions and scraping marks on the artifacts. Animal-made bite marks on all three osteoderms led them to exclude rodents as the creators of the holes.

"These observations show that these three osteoderms were modified by humans into artefacts, probably personal ornaments," the researchers wrote in their paper.

In an email to Live Science, study co-author Mírian Pacheco, a lecturer in paleontology at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, noted that "it is virtually impossible to define the real meaning these artifacts had for the occupants of Santa Elina." However, the shape and large number of osteoderms "may have influenced the making of a specific type of artifact such as a pendant," she said.

The presence of human-modified sloth bones in association with stone tools from geological layers that date to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago is strong evidence that people arrived in South America far earlier than previously assumed.

"Our evidence reinforces the interpretation that our colleagues working on Santa Elina have been talking about for 30 years," Thaís Pansani, a paleontologist at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil, said in an email to Live Science — namely, that "humans were in Central Brazil at least 27,000 years ago."

The Clovis First Hypothesis is well and truly dead. Some of the 1st ice age humans who ventured into Americas came from China, DNA study suggests. Study suggests a migration of people from China to North America from 26 to 19 thousand years ago. If this is correct, they must have rushed right down to Brazil to get in on the Giant Sloth action.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Communication Failure up at The Other McCain on time and under budget.

A Long, Long Time Ago

OK, OK, I'm gonna do it. I've been keeping these tabs open forever, waiting for "the right time" to post them. Stuff about human evolution and archeology, that I find fascinating. First, the ultimate nail in the 'Clovis First' hypothesis (which has been pretty well killed in the last few years anyway), from CNN, Fossilized footprints show humans made it to North America much earlier than first thought

The commonly held view is that people arrived in North America from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge that once connected the two continents, at the end of the Ice Age around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. But more recent -- and some contested -- discoveries have suggested humans might have been in North America earlier.

Now, researchers studying fossilized human footprints in New Mexico say they have the first unequivocal evidence that humans were in North America at least 23,000 years ago.

"The peopling of the Americas is one of those things that has been for many years very contentious and a lot of archeologists hold views with almost religious zeal," said Matthew Bennett, a professor and specialist in ancient footprints at Bournemouth University and author of a study on the new findings that published in the journal Science on Thursday.

Bennett and his colleagues were able to accurately date 61 footprints by radiocarbon dating layers of aquatic plant seeds that had been preserved above and below them. The prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin in White Sands National Park, were made 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, the researchers found.

The timing and location of the prints in southwestern North America suggests that humans must have been on the continent much earlier than previously thought, Bennett said. The people who made the footprints -- mostly teenagers and children -- were living in New Mexico at the height of the last Ice Age.

Which really calls into question when people really arrived in the New World. How could they get here at the height of the last glaciation? Boats? Had the been here since the Eemian warm era (the last warm period before the current one, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, and were living in the New World, leaving barely a trace? Seems unlikely, but then so does arriving here at the height of the ice advance.

Next, from UPI, Humans used tools to make clothes more than 100,000 thousand years ago

Humans living on the Atlantic coast of what's now Morocco were making clothes from animal hides between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Initially, researchers assumed the bones they were collecting were the remnants of an ancient meal. Scientists wanted to analyze the animal bones to better understand what Contrebandiers Cave's early human inhabitants were eating.

But instead of evidence of an ancient menu, researchers found the remnants of clothes-making tools. Scientists detailed the breakthrough discovery in a new paper, published Thursday in the journal iScience.

You want what?

"These bone tools have shaping and use marks that indicate they were used for scraping hides to make leather and for scraping pelts to make fur," lead study author Emily Hallett said in a press release.

"At the same time, I found a pattern of cut marks on the carnivore bones from Contrebandiers Cave that suggested that humans were not processing carnivores for meat but were instead skinning them for their fur," said Hallett, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.

I'm going to guess the first beauty contest was held about then, too. 

Artnet,  Archaeologists Have Uncovered Cave Art That’s Way Older Than Any on Record—and It Was Made by Children You mean Gabi's hand prints on the wall are cave art? Who knew?

A team of international scientists has uncovered ancient hand and foot prints that may upend our understanding of early cave art.

The experts believe that the impressions identified near Quesang village in the Tibetan Plateau are between 169,000 and 226,000 years old. That would make them, by far, the earliest known examples of parietal art (more commonly known as “cave art”). What’s more, they say, these works were created by children.

The discovery, published this month in Science Bulletin, was made by a group including David D. Zhang from Guangzhou University and Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University. They write that the hand and foot impressions “appear to have been intentionally placed on the surface of a unit of soft travertine.”

Phys.org, When and why did human brains decrease in size 3,000 years ago? Ants may hold clues. Short answer. Civilization made us stupider. 

"A surprising fact about humans today is that our brains are smaller compared to the brains of our Pleistocene ancestors. Why our brains have reduced in size has been a big mystery for anthropologists," explained co-author Dr. Jeremy DeSilva, from Dartmouth College.
. . .
The timing of size increase coincides with what is previously known about the early evolution of Homo and the technical advancements that led to; for example, better diet and nutrition and larger social groups.

Faster, please. Entrepreneur, This New Company Says It's Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth, As A Way to Fight Climate Change. Then release them in Central Park.

The woolly mammoth was last seen roughly 10,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. Can bringing it back help cool our warming planet now?

That’s the bold idea put forward by Colossal, a bioscience and genetics engineering company that launches today — and is backed by Harvard University and some of the world’s most forward-thinking scientists.

Fighting climate change with mammoths may seem crazy, but it has decades of research behind it — including the work of George Church, Ph.D., a world-renowned pioneer in genomics. Church runs a lab at Harvard and has been exploring how to genetically re-engineer the woolly mammoth using its closest living relative, the Asian Elephant.

The reason is this: One of the greatest threats to the earth is the melting of the arctic permafrost and its massive release of the greenhouse gasses that are stored safely in its freeze. When the herds of woolly mammoth and other animals vanished, that area became covered with a forest that keeps the earth warmer. Church is betting on the idea that a resurrected population of the mammoths, if let loose in the arctic, would chomp and stomp down the bush and trees, exposing the earth to subzero temperatures and allowing the tundra’s original grasslands to grow back. That ecosystem, maintained by the large creatures, would then effectively sequester carbon, rather than allowing it back into the atmosphere.

Real Clear Science, Humans Had Advanced Fishing Technology 12,000 Years Ago in Israel

Ancient humans living between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago in what is now Northern Israel were using sophisticated hooks, lines, weights, and lures to catch fish, a new analysis published to PLoS ONE reveals.

An international team of researchers led by Dr. Antonella Pedergnana at the University of Zurich analyzed a variety of hooks and grooved pebbles found at the Jordan River Dureijat site on the Upper Jordan River in the Hula Valley of Israel. The hooks (pictured above), are made of bone, likely taken from butchered gazelle or fallow deer, and some even have rudimentary barbs to ensure that bait stays attached and to prevent fish from escaping. The small pebble weights are primarily composed of limestone and were grooved so the ancient fishers could affix their lines. The researchers suggest that the weights were likely used in tandem with floats, perhaps made from porcupine quills, to position the baited hook at a desired depth underwater.

The Jordan River Dureijat site never seems to have been inhabited, but was "a place that people visited again and again to take advantage of the confluence of diverse lake shore resources," the researchers speculated. There are no signs that the hooks or grooved pebbles were ever manufactured there. The likeliest explanation for their abundance at the site is that they were lost in the water when fish snapped the lines, or were casually tossed aside if broken.

The ancient fishers likely hailed from the Natufian culture, who lived a mostly stationary lifestyle even before the introduction of agriculture. The varying hook sizes they used suggests that they caught numerous species of fish, including carp and trout. Fishing lines were probably crafted from plant material. Residues observed on the hooks confirm the early use of artificial lures, perhaps fashioned from shells, which attract a fish's attention via colors, movements, and vibrations.

"The use of lures by prehistoric anglers reflects detailed knowledge of fish behavior and diet," the researchers say.

Well, as we learned above, they probably were smarter than we are. 

Early Americans Waited Out the Last Ice Age in Mexico

Chiquihuite Cave

WUWT Humans inhabited North America in the depths of the last Ice Age, but didn’t thrive until the climate warmed

Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, UNSW

Chiquihuite Cave is an archaeological site more than 2,740 metres above sea level in Zacatecas, Mexico. Ciprian Ardelean of the University of Zacatecas has been leading excavations of the site for more than seven years. Nearly 2,000 stone tools and pieces created through their manufacture have been found.

The tools belongs to a type of material culture never before seen in the Americas, with no evident similarities to any other cultural complexes. Importantly, more than 200 specimens were found below an archaeological layer that corresponds to the peak of the last Ice Age. (Archaeologists call this peak the Last Glacial Maximum.)

During this time, between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, ice sheets were at their greatest extent. Evidence from Chiquihuite Cave, therefore, strongly suggests that humans were present in North America well before Clovis.

A stone tool found below the Last Glacial Maximum layer

Given the significance of the discovery, myself and a team of international researchers joined in the interdisciplinary study of Chiquihuite Cave. Some of us had the opportunity to visit the site following a four-hour long journey by foot, and see the evidence at first hand. Our aims were to reconstruct the environment humans lived in and define exactly when they occupied the site.

My own research at Chiquihuite Cave focused on the latter. I helped to build a chronology of more than 50 radiocarbon and optical dates.

Combined with the archaeological evidence, the results showed humans inhabited Chiquihuite as early as 33,000 years ago, until the cave was sealed off at the end of the Pleistocene period (around 12,000 years ago).

Clovis first has been dead for quite a while, but this is a pretty amazing finding, more or less continuous occupation of the same site by a succession of  pre-Clovis people and cultures starting at least 33,000 ago.

It's pretty clear that while humans may have reached the Western Hemisphere either early in the last glaciation, or in the Eemian Warm period, they didn't really make much population growth or environmental impact until the planet warmed again, and another wave of population came from Eurasia.

In a second paper, I explore the wider pattern of human occupation across North America and Beringia (the ancient land bridge connecting America to Asia). This involved analysing hundreds of dates obtained from 42 archaeological sites in North America and Beringia, including Chiquihuite Cave, using a statistical tool called Bayesian age modelling.

The analysis showed there were humans in North America before, during and immediately after the peak of the last Ice Age. However, it was not until much later that populations expanded significantly across the continent.

This occurred during a period of climate warming at the end of the Ice Age called Greenland Interstadial 1. The warming began suddenly with a pulse of increased global temperature around 14,700 years ago.

We also observed that the three major stone tool traditions in the wider region started around the same time. This coincides with an increase in archaeological sites and radiocarbon dates from those sites, as well as genetic data pointing to marked population growth.

The Death of the Cordillera Ice Free Corridor Hypothesis?

A final blow to myth of how people arrived in the Americas

. . . It all comes down to timing, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The ice-free corridor through the Canadian cordillera couldn't have supported human migration until about 12,600 years ago. But the Clovis people were already living south of the ice sheets by 13,500 years ago.

So what did happen?

The broad strokes haven't changed. When the Ice Age lowered sea levels and turned the Bering Strait into a land bridge, ancients migrated from Siberia to present-day Alaska, where they encountered a massive icy roadblock preventing further migrations deeper into the Americas. So the people hunkered down in that small Alaska region, called Beringia, for thousands of years.

It's not as simple as figuring out when the ice-free corridor opened up. The corridor is thought to have actually been open around 15,000 to 14,000 years ago – early enough to predate the Clovis settlements south of the ice (although they would have had to hustle to make it from Beringia to those settlements via the corridor).

But just because there wasn't an ice sheet in their way anymore, doesn't mean that people could have migrated down the approximately 930-mile-long corridor. After being scoured down to bedrock by mile-high ice sheets, it took time for the land to become biologically rich enough to support migrating humans.

Evidence from the rest of the world suggests that it doesn't take much of an environment to support people. There are, or at least were, primitive humans living in the most forbidding environments, from the arctic Greenland to the Kalahari desert.

Plants and animals would have to be thriving along the whole corridor to provide inviting food sources, wood for fire, and other survival needs. Humans venturing out from Beringia likely didn't know what lay to their south, so they wouldn't have prepared for a long journey. They would have simply seen a new region of land to settle.

And, as Meltzer told Nature, "It's 1,500 kilometres. You can't pack a lunch and do it in a day."

No, but supremely practiced survivalists could do it in less time than you think. A few practice round trips by the more adventuresome Beringians, and I suspect that they would be be itching to put together a mission to take the wife(s) and kids to the promised land of milk and honey, or at least mammoths and elk south of the ice.

I think it's a mistake to underestimate the adventuresome nature of mankind.  I'm sure that once the corridor opened, humans were exploring it, looking for something, anything really, they could exploit. And of all the people we know, the Clovis culture may have been the most adventuresome. In the course of a few hundred years, they left their tools over two continents, and then disappeared. It's hard to imagine it was from population pressures, or even lack of resources, as the last of the North American Megafauna were found all over the continent, having never been hunted by man previously and relatively naive to the threat posed by the simian invasive species. Nope, they just had a bad case of wanderlust.

I'm not arguing for the central corridor route over the coastal route. Humans have oriented to water for food and transportation for a long time, and likely had the ability to make canoes capable of long sea trips. However, in the absence of proof that they could not come through the ice free corridor, I would expect the answer to be both rather than one alone.

Wombat-socho snuck in late with "Rule 5 Sunday: Viva Los Lobos!".