Across Atlantic Ice

[Minimalist]

http://www.amazon.com/Across-Atlantic-Ic...0520227832

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional--and often subjective--approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

[popeyespappy]

Didn't we talk about this not to long ago?

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Saw something on the tube last night about a 45000 year old fossilized mammoth that looked suspiciously like a meat stash. Complete with what appeared to be tool marks on some of the bones.


In Colorado.

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We did cover this topic not long ago.

http://atheistforums.org/thread-8744-pos...#pid185070

[Shell B]

I've often wondered how much we would learn if we could investigate the bottom of the ocean like we can on land. I bet a few ancient artifacts would have made it to the bottom, if the above were the case.

To be honest, I don't think we will ever know what the earliest civilization in North America was.

[Anomalocaris]

I think we will.

I think for your typical reasonably educated person, the biggest shock by far won't be who the earliest Americans were and when they came here. It would be just how large the scale of native societies were, how different their argriculture were compare to those from the old world, and how dramatic an impact on global climate they had prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

For example, the Amazon rain forest which have ecologists up in arms may not really be a primitive rain forest at all, but the remains of a unique native American style agri-forrestry.

[Shell B]

Their agriculture? They were hunter/gatherers for certain, Chuck. If they were agricultural, it would be as obvious as a footprint in the mud.

At any rate, their very lifestyle and hunter/gatherer nature makes it a fucking bitch to pinpoint them. Piles of bones and cooking areas are about all we have of Clovis. Go back a few more thousand years, we don't have shit. It is going to be next to impossible to decide who was here first. We've gotten lucky with some carbon in certain kill camps. That will not always be the case.

[popeyespappy]

I think Chuck may be referring to terra preta. Depending on just exactly how large the scale of what the people were doing in the Amazon between 450 BC and 950 AD they could indeed have had an impact on global climate through both deforestation and CO2 production.

[Anomalocaris]

Not the first Americans, but those that lived during the several thousand years before Columbus. The evidence of huge scale of agriculture and other forms of intensive land management is obvious as foot print in mud, it's just that few made the connection because they were so different from agriculture and land management as practiced in the old world.

[Minimalist]

Dennis Stanford's evidence in support of the Solutrean Hypothesis deals with the style of tool being fashioned in Spain/France and what was later termed the "Clovis" style of point found in Clovis, New Mexico as an archetype. Repeated pressure flakes are removed from a core making it thinner and with a characteristic flute removed to enable attachment to a shaft.

The precursor of such flaking appears in Solutrean points but in Siberia where the Bering-strait adherents insist we originated the style of tool in use was called "micro-blade"

http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/3...yspt_nlp48

and frankly could not be more different from the clovis style of point.

[Shell B]

Oh, well agriculture sure did come. It just didn't come as soon as people did. I'm talking about finding it doubtful that we will ever pinpoint the first civilization in America. I am sure we will find many early civilizations and have already found evidence of early agriculture.

Wouldn't they just shit a brick if they found Clovis points in Africa or Australia? Ha!

[Minimalist]

H/G or even pastoralist cultures do not leave significant building marks on the land. That is for the agricultural-based societies where you have a structured society with rulers ( and the ever parasitic priests on top) and the peasant farmers on the bottom doing what they are told by their version of the upper 1%.

Wouldn't they just shit a brick if they found Clovis points in Africa or Australia? Ha!

You bet your butt they would!