Posted on 10/11/2004 6:04:15 PM PDT by blam
Deseret Morning News, Sunday, October 03, 2004
Mexico discovery fuels debate about man's origins
Archeologists are baffled by hominid bones
By John Rice
Associated Press
MEXICO CITY — For decades, Federico Solorzano has gathered old bones from the shores of Mexico's largest lake — bones he found and bones he was brought, bones of beasts and bones of men.
Mexican professor Federico Solorzano shows the supraorbital arch from the fossil of an early hominid.
Guillermo Arias, Associated Press The longtime teacher of anthropology and paleontology was sifting through his collection one day when he noticed some that didn't seem to fit: a mineral-darkened piece of brow ridge bone and a bit of jaw that didn't match any modern skulls.
But Solorzano found a perfect fit when he placed the brow against a model of the Old World's Tautavel Man — member of a species, Homo erectus, that many believe was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens.
The catch: Homo erectus is believed to have died out 100,000 to 200,000 years ago — tens of thousands of years before men are believed to have reached the Americas.
And archaeologists have never found a trace of Homo erectus in the Americas.
"Most people sort of just shook their heads and have been baffled by it," said Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University.
"That doesn't mean it's not real. It just means there's not any comparative evidence."
Solorzano's find was described at a September conference here that drew academics from Europe and the Americas to discuss new research on early man in the Americas.
That primitive brow ridge from Lake Chapala "is in a category by itself," Bonnichsen said.
It is so strange — and so out of context — that it has been largely ignored even as other discoveries are raising basic questions about the story of human beings in the Americas: when they arrived and where they came from.
Until recently, most U.S. archaeologists believed that the first Americans arrived about 13,500 years ago when a temporary land corridor opened across the Bering Strait.
The migrant Clovis people, named for a site near Clovis, N.M., apparently hunted mammoths and other large animals, leaving scatterings of finely worked spear tips and other tools across North America and, some argue, South America.
A sometimes vehement minority still holds to that "Clovis first" position. The evidence of what could have come before remains sparse, scattered and controversial. Archaeologists have proposed possible alternative routes to the Americas — across the Pacific from Asia or Australia, across the Atlantic from Europe or Africa — though most say a trip from northeast Asia is most likely, perhaps by people advancing along a frozen coast in small boats.
South American researchers say they have found numerous sites that are 10,000 to 15,000 years old and argue that Clovis people could not have migrated all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America so soon after the ice-free corridor opened from Asia to Alaska.
Argentine archaeologist Laura Miotti agrees the settlers likely came from the north. But she and others say there are no Clovis-like finds in the part of Asia from which the migrants supposedly came, and they question why North American sites don't appear to be older than those in South America.
The evidence for earlier human habitation in the Americas, however scanty, is tantalizing. It includes:
— A possible handscraper splotched with blood more than 34,000 years ago at Monte Verde in Chile.
— Possible stone tools at a site in Brazil that is 40,000 to 50,000 years old.
— A not-yet-published report of human remains dated as much as 28,000 years old near Puebla in central Mexico.
Most crucially, a majority of archaeologists are convinced that a second site at Monte Verde dates to at least 14,000 years ago — some 500 years before the land bridge from Asia opened more than 9,000 miles to the north.
Yet the early dates are still often questioned.
A claim of 250,000-year-old human tools near Mexico's Valsequillo reservoir was widely laughed at in the 1970s, though other researchers are once again working at that area.
Clovis-first advocates suggest that the early dates may reflect variations or errors in the still-developing technologies of dating old samples.
They say natural breakage could account for some of what look like early tools and that the dating of others was likely confused, as when streams, floods or human beings mix new material into old.
As for human remains, only two teeth in Brazil seem to have been directly dated to clearly pre-Clovis times.
"If you are trying to break through a barrier that is well established, you need well documented, incontrovertible proof," said archaeologist Stuart Fiedel, author of a textbook on early Americans and a proponent of the Clovis-first model.
Both sides say that new research on DNA and climate history supports their claims, or at least fails to undermine them.
Solorzano's finds raise so many unanswerable questions that they have remained just a curiosity.
Solorzano, 83, is a respected researcher who has taught generations of university students in the city of Guadalajara.
He says the brow bone raises "many questions, one of them being its great and amazing resemblance to primitive hominid forms whose presence in the Americas has not been generally accepted."
The few other scientists who have analyzed the bones closely agree that they look human — not animal — and are very, very old.
"They were definitely human," said Joel Irish, a specialist in bioarchaeology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
He suggested they could be from "a very primitive looking modern human" but said they would be "very early."
Efforts to date the pieces using modern techniques so far have failed due to lack of surviving tissue.
Most frustrating for archaeologists is that nobody knows quite where the bone came from or even when it was found.
It was apparently picked up when drought exposed a large ring of the Chapala lake bed from 1947 to 1956.
Archaeologist Stanley Davis, then at Texas A&M, spent several seasons accompanying Solorzano on surveys of the region and said he located places he would like to investigate further.
"It takes a lot of money. That's the reason I'm not down there working right now," he said by telephone.
Davis said other human bones in the same area that are about 6,000 to 7,000 years old lack the mineralized darkness of age found in the brow and jaw pieces.
Davis said the Chapala area is interesting because the lake is very old and is a likely spot for coast-hopping migrants to come inland.
Yet relatively few people have investigated the area so far. Until recently, Mexican archaeologists tended to focus on the spectacular indigenous cultures of the Olmecs, Mayas, Aztecs and others that arose in the last 3,000 years or so.
Davis said the Chapala-area finds included 12 scattered skulls of a long-extinct horse species. All have been smashed between the eyes.
"Either we have a herd of very stupid horses ... or we have some other action responsible for their death. That action is probably human," he said. He estimated the horses were likely 10,000 to 20,000 years old.
A cache of swamp-deer teeth included several that were grooved, apparently for use in a necklace, he said. A radio carbon test showed one was roughly 20,000 years old. "That tells us we may have something."
The "Out of Africa" theory isn't in danger. It only says anatomically modern man emerged from Africa 100-120,000 ya.
This find is pretty interesting because of what it might say about Homo Erectus. Apparently he was more sophisticated than believed. He is now thought to be a seafarer and is known to have survived in southeast Asia until the coming of modern humans. Maybe he did the same in America.
related:
First Americans - Homo Erectus in America
http://home.pacbell.net/tcbpfb/
January 01, 1999 | Tom Baldwin (apparently)
Posted on 09/24/2004 7:54:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1226526/posts
10 posted on 09/24/2004 11:27:29 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1226526/posts?page=10#10
Weren't the American continents supposed to have separated from the old world millions of years before any kind of hominids or humans evolved?
South America and Africa seperated 120 million years ago. They continue to seperate at about the same rate as your fingernails grow.
Natural selection? ;)
ping
"but I just had to post this pic."
LOL!Don't tell us- it is obvious- the devil made you do it.
Do you perhaps mean Au Natural?
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RRS James Cook cruise JC007, 5 March 2007 – 17 April 2007
Scientists have discovered a large area thousands of square kilometres in extent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the Earth's crust seems to be missing entirely. Instead, the mantle - the deep interior of the Earth, normally covered by crust many kilometres thick - is exposed on the seafloor, 3000m below the surface. It has been described as being like an open wound on the surface of the Earth. What scientists don't know is whether the ocean crust was first developed, and then ripped away by huge geological faults, or whether it never even developed in the first place.
...an image from the tripod camera, showing the rig sitting on bare rock, covered in the foreground by a dusting of white sediment. Note the leg of the drill rig, and a sea urchin for scale in the centre of the picture.
From EIU 'The Bottom of the Atlantic' :
'The absence of thick sediment on the level floor presents "another of many scientific riddles our expedition propounded." It indicates that the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the Ridge was only very recently formed. At the same time, on the flanks of the Ridge the layers of sediment in some places are "thousands of feet thick, as was expected."
(V quotes from 'New Discoveries on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge' National Geographic Magazine, Vol XCVI, No. 5 (November 1949).
There's no mystery...the continents moved apart, the Mexican did what Mexicans do; he WALKED!
Nice shot of Atlantis... :’)
...I can see the outline of it in the centre of the ridge, almost straight across from the Pillars of Hercules...
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.they called AAA for trip tickets..”
You just aged yourself.
Not so. There is one in a cabinet level position of our current government.
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