Broken mastodon bones hint that Homo sapiens wasn’t the first hominin to get to the New World. Ewen Callaway. 26 April 2017 ... The study focuses on ancient animal-bone fragments found in 1992 during road repairs in suburban San Diego. The find halted construction, and palaeontologist Tom Deméré of the San Diego Natural History Museum led a five-month excavation. His crew uncovered teeth, tusks and bones of an extinct relative of elephants called a mastodon (Mammut americanum), alongside large broken and worn rocks. ... ...“We thought of some possible explanations for this pattern, and the process we kept coming back to was that humans might be involved," he says. ... ... Some archaeologists, however, maintain that humans arrived earlier. They point to sites containing rocks that resemble stone tools as well as large animal bones that have damage apparently inflicted by humans. Deméré's co-authors Kathleen Holen and her husband Steven Holen, archaeologists at the Center for American Paleolithic Research in Hot Springs, South Dakota, have put forward several sites in the US Midwest as evidence for a human presence in the Americas up to 40,000 years ago3. But many scientists have viewed these claims with scepticism. ... There's more http://www.nature.com/news/controversial-study-claims-humans-reached-americas-100-000-years-earlier-than-thought-1.21886It would be more exciting if they had some people bones.
“The claims made are extraordinary and the potential implications staggering," says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene who studies the peopling of the Americas. “But broken bones and stones alone do not make a credible archaeological site in my view." He and many other archaeologists say it will take much stronger evidence to convince them that the bones were fractured by ancient people. Science | AAAS
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. While certainly intriguing, it doesn’t appear the group that’s making this claim has reached that threshold yet.
“The claims made are extraordinary and the potential implications staggering," says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene who studies the peopling of the Americas. “But broken bones and stones alone do not make a credible archaeological site in my view." He and many other archaeologists say it will take much stronger evidence to convince them that the bones were fractured by ancient people. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/were-humans-americas-100000-years-earlier-scientists-thought Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. While certainly intriguing, it doesn't appear the group that's making this claim has reached that threshold yet.True enough, in a way I was just looking to suggest a different discussion from the usual these days. Human origins and migrations over the past hundreds of thousands of years is fascinating and amazing - Here in America,? who knows well over ten, twenty thousand years worth, maybe more, some say much more, new evidence keeps coming in ... specially with the DNA finger printing techniques developed over the past decades. Here's something more interesting and down to evidence
Native American origins: When the DNA points two ways LaTimes - native-american-origins-dna-20150721-story ... In a wide-ranging paper in the journal Science, University of Copenhagen Centre for GeoGenetics Director Eske Willerslev and coauthors studied genomes from ancient and modern people in the Americas and Asia. They concluded that migrations into the New World had to have occurred in a single wave from Siberia, timed no earlier than 23,000 years ago. They also calculated that any genes shared with Australo-Melanesian peoples must have been contributed through relatively recent population mixing. In the meantime, Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich and colleagues, focusing more closely on the Australo-Melanesian genes in a study published in Nature, came to a different conclusion: that the DNA had to have arrived in the Americas very long ago and that founding migrations occurred in more than one wave. "It was crazy and unexpected and very weird and we spent the last year and a half trying to understand it," Reich said on Monday. But "it's inconsistent to a single founding population. People in Amazonia have ancestry from two divergent sources...we think this is a real observation." Kennewick Man's DNA reveals he was a Native American, study says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a coauthor of the Science paper ...Fun stuff to think about and speculate over.