Re-Learning History
By: Mike Luoma
Tags: Archaeology, Humanity, Science, Discovery, Ancient History

We’re moving further back in the Americas, too.

For the longest time, archaeologists believed modern humans came to the Americas from Asia relatively late, across a land bridge in the Bering Strait around 12,000 years ago (you might remember that one from school). But there is now evidence telling us that isn’t the case at all.

We may have been here over 15,000 years ago. In fact, there could be proof humans were here over 130,000 years ago!

But before we get to one of the most fascinating new discoveries on that front, there’s a point worth making. There’s an odd quality to Archaeology, it seems, among the sciences, where a prevailing assumption, if propounded with enough force by a forceful enough academic “personality”, becomes a prevailing “fact” — even to the detriment of doing actual science. It can be very difficult to change a prevailing idea.

One of these assumptions was what they called the “Clovis First” hypothesis.

“For nearly half a century, schoolchildren have been taught that the first human visitors to the New World belonged to the Clovis culture… (who) crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago. To dispute Clovis-first by a few thousand years was controversial… But to propose a site more than 100,000 years older was professional suicide. It would undermine the research and reputations of most archaeologists now studying the New World,” noted the Los Angeles Times, in their December 2017 article, Archaeology As Blood Sport: How An Ancient Mastodon Ignited Debate Over Humans’ Arrival In North America.

And so, when The Cerutti Mastadon Site discoveries were announced in San Diego, California in 2017, offering a possible date around 130,000 years ago for the appearance of modern humans in the Americas — well over ten times earlier than had been the prevailing assumption — the peer-reviewed science, published in the most esteemed journal, Nature, was rejected and dismissed by many without proper consideration.

“‘If you claim something is that old, you get blasted,’ (Richard) Cerutti said, ‘which is why some archaeologists stopped working on sites like this. They didn’t want to get blasted’.”[xxi]

Blasted? The L.A. Times article explained: “George Jefferson, former associate curator of the Page Museum in Los Angeles and district paleontologist for the California State Parks, was blunt: The archaeological community was not ready for such an unsettling claim of antiquity. ‘Keep it under wraps,’ he said. ‘No one will believe you.’[xxii]

The San Diego Museum of Natural History’s curator of paleontology, Tom Deméré, was stunned by the backlash against their peer-reviewed findings after their publication in 2017. “I was taken by surprise that it would be that extreme,” he said in a video accompanying the article. “Certainly the extreme negative reactions. Almost emotional reactions, and saying ‘it’s impossible,’ ‘It can’t be! And it can’t be because I say it can’t be!’[xxiii]”

What they discovered — and documented with the assistance of a highly credentialed team — is pretty amazing: It’s what seem to be the remains left by human scavengers who picked apart a Mastadon carcass, and broke open its bones to get to the marrow. One of the mastodon’s tusks was stuck directly, vertically, into the ground, as if to mark the spot. Bones which defy breaking by natural elements were shattered, and piled around the site. Anomalous rocks and cobblestones were there, primitive hammers used in their scavenging.

“(They) assembled a team… of paleontologists, archaeologists, geoarchaeologists, mastodon specialists, Paleo-Indian specialists, sedimentologists, geomorphologists, geochronologists and lithic fabrication specialists,” the L.A. Times reported. “Each scientist took an element of the site and applied their proficiency. One concluded that there had been no raging torrents that might have crashed the stones and bones together in a seasonal fury. Another focused on the fragments scattered around the site. The few pieces of bone that they found fit into the smooth spiral fractures… another re-dated the site… …concluded that the bones were 130,700 years old… George Jefferson, who had advised Deméré to “keep it under wraps,” was invited for his experience… “Each new test,” he said, “supported the claim.”[xxiv]

“The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and (4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context,” [xxv] the group wrote in Nature in April of 2017.

After a year of peer review and testing, they revealed their findings: “Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum).”[xxvi]

The Cerutti Mastodon Site — Photo Credit: From January 25th, 1993 — A concentration of fossil bone and rock. The unusual positions of the femur heads, one up and one down, broken in the same manner next to each other is unusual. Mastodon molars are located in the lower right hand corner next to a large rock comprised of andesite which is in contact with a broken vertebra. Upper left is a rib angled upwards resting on a granitic pegmatite rock fragment. SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM.

The Mastodon bones, tusks and fragments found dated back to 130,700 (± 9,400) years. The way the fragments were spread around suggested that the breakage occurred at the site. The spiral-fracturing pattern of the bone and molar fragments indicated the breakage occurred while the corpse was fresh, and several fragments displayed evidence of having been pounded on by the rocks found nearby. Five of the rocks found on site (“large cobbles”) showed wear and impact marks indicating they were used as hammerstones and anvils. And given they were found in sand and silt, water didn’t wash them there.

“These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production… The CM site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.”[xxvii]

They were savagely attacked by their fellow academics — the Times didn’t call Archaeology a “Blood Sport” for nothing.

Two of the more surprising sources of criticism, in a National Geographic article covering the Cerutti Mastodon announcement, were scientists who had suffered for their own Pre-Clovis discoveries.[xxviii] Now, they were, in effect, casting the same kind of aspersions at Deméré and his team.

Tom Dillehay fought for years for recognition that his discoveries at Monte Verde in Chile were authentic. And Jim Adovasio incurred the wrath of the “Clovis First”-ers when he kept digging at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter site in Pennsylvania and found signs of a demonstrably older human habitation.

“Adovasio… discovered evidence that humans had camped at Meadowcroft, under a protective rock overhang, sixteen thousand years ago — a few thousand years before the Siberian crossing. ‘Nobody believed it… ‘They said our dating had to be wrong’,” Adavasio said in a 2013 New Yorker story. “A couple of years later, however, archaeologists working at a site known as Monte Verde, in Chile, found evidence of a human presence at least fourteen thousand eight hundred years old.” [xxix]

Yet, even in 2013, Meadowcroft’s dating was still controversial: “You can find people who would sit here with you today and say, ‘None of these pre-Clovis sites are real. They’re all nonsense. There’s something wrong with every one of them,’ although that number keeps shrinking,” Adovasio said at the time. “It has become clear that there have been multiple incursions from Siberia by ethnically, linguistically, genetically, and technologically different populations. Some of these pulses may have begun before the last glacial maximum, before twenty-two thousand years ago. Not all of them would have succeeded.[xxx]

Now, all that said, Adavasio’s dismissal of the Cerutti Mastodon site seems surprising. Although, revising back a few thousand years is, perhaps, one thing — a hundred thousand certainly another. Then again, maybe Adovasio didn’t want Meadowcroft to have to give up the claim to possess “the earliest evidence of people in North America, dating back 16,000 years.”[xxxi] Or it could just be simple defensiveness — Meadowcroft’s dating continues to come under attack. A 2016 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article on a reunion with old colleagues from the dig refers to “the still controversial idea that the Meadowcroft Rockshelter is pre-Clovis.”[xxxii]

As mentioned above, it was Dillehay in South America with his Monte Verde site in Chile that truly forced the Pre-Clovis issue after two decades of study — back in 1997. “A group of archeologists, including some of Monte Verde’s staunchest critics, inspected the artifacts and visited the site, coming away thoroughly convinced,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Finally vindicated, Dillehay said, ‘Most archeologists had always thought there was a pre-Clovis culture out there somewhere, and I knew that if they would only come to the site and look at the setting and see the artifacts, they would agree that Monte Verde was pre-Clovis’.”[xxxiii]

But. It is a tribute to the stubborn staying power of the Clovis hypothesis, and — perhaps moreso — to the ardent zeal and ignoble, vindictive academic power of its supporters, that over 20 years later most people still don’t know the Clovis claims have been disproven. Even some who agreed on the early dating of Monte Verde in ’97 have equivocated since.

Dillehay has continued to publish on Monte Verde. In 2015, he helped author a study on new evidence suggesting human habitation there between 18,500 and 14,500 years ago.[xxxiv] Intriguingly, towards the paper’s end they state that, “…the chronology and nature of the peopling of the New World are the focus of great deliberation between multiple schools of thought: some stress a short chronology and others a long chronology, some advocate one migration and others multiple migrations, some point to Asia as the only source of human entry and others point to Europe.” They go on to state, “For the moment, the majority of anatomical, archaeological and genetic evidence gives credence to the view that people were relatively recent arrivals to the Americas, probably sometime between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. The current evidence presented here for the Monte Verde area best fits this scenario; however, this may change as more data are gathered and assessed. The early archaeological record of the Americas continues to be remarkably unpredictable and intriguingly complex”.[xxxv]

This was just over a year before Deméré et al published on the Cerutti Mastadon site, and yet this assessment seems more charitable than Dillehay was willing to be towards the Cerutti Mastodon Site findings.

Dillehay remains active. Earlier this year, he led publication on more evidence from Monte Verde for a date of habitation around 14,500 years ago.[xxxvi]

Like Adavasio, Dillehay was willing to go Pre-Clovis — but not by much. Yet the provenance of the Cerutti Mastodon site suggests the dating of human migration into North America may have to be reevaluated yet again, whether Dillehay, Adovasio and the others want to or not.

They forced a revision of the timeline for the migration into the Americas, which keeps creeping back still, based on new discoveries (recent findings in Texas place Pre-Clovis humans there 15,500 years ago).[xxxvii]

Adavasio, Dillehay, and their contemporaries overturned Clovis-First, allowing for slightly earlier settlements in the Americas. But taking a giant leap back more than 100,000 years seems to be too big of an ask for many of them right now.

All the same… We keep moving back.

The work continues — history is, indeed, always changing. Dillehay’s latest results were published in April, while at the same time another site near Monte Verde announced the discovery of — possibly — the oldest footprint found in the Americas, at 15,600 years old.[xxxviii] In May, in Tibet, we found the first fossil evidence of Denisovans outside of the cave where they were originally discovered, from about 160,000 years ago[xxxix].

And now? We have the Apidima skull announcement, placing an anatomically modern human in Greece 210,000 years ago — the discovery of humans in Europe tens of thousands of years earlier than we ever thought possible.

We do keep moving back.

We seem to discover something new about humankind’s early origins nearly every day.

And so? It seems we must always be relearning history.

Mike Luoma is a writer and researcher from Vermont — find out more at http://MikeLuoma.com.