Researchers in Southern California have unearthed archaeological evidence that suggests humans lived in North America 130,000 years ago – predating previous estimates by over 100,000 years and throwing grave doubts upon what we thought we knew about the history of the continent.
The San Diego Natural History Museum announced the findings to the public on Wednesday.
NPR reports: In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren’t so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it.
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“The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones,” says Tom Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones.
It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Deméré thinks these people were after something else. “The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone,” Deméré says, “to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow.” Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories.
The scientists knew they’d uncovered something rare. But they didn’t realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn’t exist in the 1990s.
The bones were 130,000 years old. That’s a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
“That is an order of magnitude difference. Wow,” says John Shea, an archaeologist at New York’s Stony Brook University who specializes in studying ancient toolmaking. “If it’s correct, then there’s an extraordinarily ancient dispersal to the New World that has a very different archaeological signature from anything left behind by recent humans.”
Shea says it’s different because Stone Age toolmakers usually leave behind stone flakes — sharp pieces broken or “knapped” from certain kinds of rock that serve as cutting implements. There were none at the California site. Another odd thing: no signs that the mastodon was butchered for the meat.
“This is weird,” Shea says. “It’s an outlier in terms of what archaeological sites from that time range look like everywhere else on the planet.” He suggests these bones might have been broken up by natural causes — by a mudflow, perhaps, or by the trampling of animals sometime after the mastodon died.
Another skeptic is John McNabb, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in England. His question: How did those people get to California?
Twenty thousand years ago, archaeologists agree, people did cross over to Alaska from Siberia, perhaps more than once. Sea levels were lower then and there was a land bridge connecting the continents. In an interview with the journal Nature, which published the California research, McNabb says that land bridge wasn’t there 130,000 years ago. “The sea lane in between the two continents [was] wider [then],” he says, “so that’s one problem with this: How do we get humans across?”
McNabb says what’s needed to really prove that this is truly an archaeological site are bones from the people who got there.
The California team counters that it has spent over 20 years examining the evidence. “I know people will be skeptical with this because it is so surprising,” says team member and archaeologist Steve Holen, “and I was skeptical when I first looked at the material myself. But it’s definitely an archaeological site.”
Holen, with the Center for American Paleolithic Research, says these early people could have come across in boats. As for the broken bones, he says the type of fracture isn’t accidental. And the way the hammerstones and bones were distributed in the ground doesn’t look natural.
One question the team can’t answer is who these people were. A genetic technique that uses mutations in a population’s genome as a sort of “clock” says the first common ancestor of Native Americans lived about 20,000 years ago. So if there were indeed earlier settlers, it could be they made an arduous migration from Siberia, only to die out without leaving any descendants.
Baxter Dmitry
Email: baxter@thepeoplesvoice.tv
All “Western” science and history are bunk. All are lies, known to be lies by those in power. The American people have been purposely told lies to try to support the Biblical” time line, so that the American people would support the evil of Zionism.
I agree. If you look at the parts of the world there are currently conflicts, over 80% were mentioned in the bible. This leads me to believe that all this terrorism business is just a cover for socially, culturally, and geographically (ie “historically”) cleansing/altering the Middle East….and parts of Africa to fit the biblical narrative.
I mean seriously…Where is the biggest US military base outside of the continental US? It’s in Iraq….Babylon to be exact…as in built directly on top of it before it was even partially excavated. Bulldozers literally cleared exposed parts of buildings to make the footprint for the base…
-Oz
History is the biggest lie ever
This discovery occurred by accident. There is a reason for that. I have heard/read about systemic limitations on the depth of archaeological digs you can do in North America. It’s conveniently cloaked in concerns for Native American sovereignty, and the implications of what such discoveries might do to the perception of their historical heritage. Personally I have always felt that the history of this country is a total lie, and that there are people who know the truth who would rather the rest of us don’t. I believe at the time of America’s “discovery” there were already large cities here. That there were also “white” people living here, both integrated with “Native American Indians”, and living in villages the same way they had in places like Austria, Germany, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Scotland….and wherever the fuck the Vikings came from. It would explain certain anomalies I have noted. White slavery. Commonly explained away as imported “indentured servants”, “prisoners” in our history books…etc, but could just as easily have been “white” natives who were captured and enslaved by “colonists”. It would also explain why despite all the “racism” and all that business, that there were black slave owners, as well as “Native Americans” participating in the practice.
There is evidence that all of the ore that fed the Bronze Age came from mines in Minnesota. There are to this day genetic markers in some South Americans that were native from Okinawa. There have been multiple discoveries of troves of Egyptian antiquities in North America, braids of North American Tobacco, Coca leaves in Egyptian sarcophagus’, and the similarities between South/Central American and Egyptian culture, symbolism, iconography, and building styles are undeniable. It’s clear from these indicators that contact had been established, and persisted for centuries between people who were living here, and those living elsewhere.
-Oz