Skeletal Remains May Be 11,000 Years Old (Lake Jackson, Texas)

LAKE JACKSON -- The gummy clay of coastal Texas holds plenty of secrets, but it may have given up one of its oldest when routine excavation near here uncovered prehistoric human bones.

Archaeologist Robert d'Aigle unearthed bones three years ago in the San Bernard River National Wildlife Refuge in south Brazoria County. He may have found only the third human skeleton in North America that dates back at least 10,000 years.

The bones -- a skull, two vertebrae and part of a jaw with some teeth -- may date back 11,000 years or more, according to preliminary analysis that included radiocarbon dating at the University of Arizona.

A final report on the site and the find were submitted this week to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by Spring-based archaeologist Robert d'Aigle, who recovered the skeletal remains three years ago in the San Bernard River National Wildlife Refuge in south Brazoria County.

The bones were turned up during mechanical excavation work on a levee on federal land in the refuge, he said. They were buried about three feet deep in what d'Aigle thinks is a vertical position, leading him to suspect the area was a bog in which the victim became trapped and died.

D'Aigle said experts who examined the remains believe they are from an adolescent female who was about 4 feet tall.

If confirmed, this would be only the third discovery in North America of skeletal remains that are 10,000 or more years old, experts say. As such, "Brazoria Girl" may turn out to be a milestone in documenting the inhabitation of the continent.

The find comes as scientists are rethinking the long-held theory that North and South America were populated by prehistoric tribes that crossed from Asia via a Bering Strait land bridge. Even those who don't question the migration aren't sure about its timing.

D'Aigle, a registered professional archaeologist, said his discovery may force scientists to revise their timetable.

Anthropologist Michael Collins of the Texas Archaeological Research Lab in Austin called the find "rare and extremely important," but doubted it would be as important as d'Aigle thinks. Other discoveries, mainly of artifacts, have long since established human presence in Texas 100 centuries ago, Collins said.

"There is carbon dating and then there is carbon dating," he added, expressing reservations about the University of Arizona's testing capabilities. He urged more tests on both bones and soil, noting that bones often are contaminated by carbon from surrounding soil.

Most prehistoric discoveries are subjected to multiple tests by several labs, Collins said. Until that is done, "I certainly wouldn't call this a hoax, but its reliability is in question," he said.

But Collins' own nominee for the most highly credentialed carbon dating analyst in the country, geologist Tom Stafford of Boulder, Colo., said he has little doubt that d'Aigle's find is the real deal.

D'Aigle sent an ear bone and a sample of soil from within the skull to the Stafford Research Laboratories for analysis. Stafford said that, while his own radiocarbon testing was inconclusive, other signs, such as the soil in which the bones were found, point to the remains being at least 11,000 years old.

Stafford also said the importance of d'Aigle's find is not necessarily that it is the oldest human skeleton on the continent, but that it is one of so very few.

As such, he termed it "a pretty incredible discovery" on par with two other 10,000- to 11,000-year-old specimens, one from Montana and the other from California.

Besides, he said, the University of Arizona has a "spectacular" lab and is capable of reliable radiocarbon testing. However, he too said more testing by other labs is needed to determine the age of the remains.

As for the discovery's importance, he said, "I'd give a very enthusiastic but qualified 'yes.'

"I think we're in the right ballpark for age. I think it really may be what Bob (d'Aigle) thinks it is."

D'Aigle said his delay in announcing his April 1999 discovery was imposed by his contract obligations to the federal government. The radiocarbon dating and other analysis done on the recovered remains was done largely on a voluntary basis by several labs and at least 10 scientists, he said.

The findings were included in a report submitted this week to the Fish and Wildlife Service. D'Aigle said he was free to talk publicly only after completing the report.

David Siegel, historic preservation officer for the federal agency's southwest region, said the remains may go to the University of Texas for museum preservation and possible exhibition. He cautioned that federal regulations about the handling of Native American remains and artifacts will first have to be considered.

The discovery site has been covered with dirt to preserve it and prevent tampering, Siegel said.

"At this juncture, we have no plans other than to leave the site alone," he said. "It could be years before we do anything further."

Here's another interesting article, but it's too late and I'm too tired to post it on its own thread just now:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/82038_mastodon09.shtml

Still unresolved: The puzzle of the mastodon's bones

Site of Sequim find and its pointed stone is donated to conservancy

Friday, August 9, 2002

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

At the end of the last ice age, a mastodon died near modern-day Sequim only to have its bones recovered some 14,000 years later. The discovery spawned a scientific feud still simmering today.

Yesterday, 25 years to the day in 1977 since Emanuel Manis accidentally dug up the mastodon's tusks, his widow donated the two-acre site to the non-profit Archaeological Conservancy, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

Manis, who died in April 2000, unearthed the bones while digging with a backhoe, intending to create a duck pond in the yard. Instead, he created a new listing for the National Register of Historic Places.

"We wanted to make sure it was protected," said Clare Manis Hatler, now 71 and remarried. "It's not every day you find tusks in your front yard."

And it's not every day such a discovery poses a major challenge to established theory.

"It was the first direct evidence of humans associated with mastodons anywhere in the world," contended Dr. Carl Gustafson, a retired Washington State University archaeology professor and one of the first scientists to study the bones recovered from the grassy pasture now known as the Manis Mastodon site.

Not everyone agrees with him, Gustafson acknowledged, because the evidence is still not universally accepted. Before the Sequim find, he said, the conventional wisdom within the scientific community had been that humans didn't hunt, eat or even cross paths with the prehistoric mastodons.

But the Manis mastodon was found to have died with some type of projectile point embedded in one of its ribs.

"They (the examining scientists) were perplexed by the projectile point because nobody had even thought it possible that humans might have been hunting these creatures some 14,000 years ago," said Gene Hurych, Western regional director for the conservancy's office in Sacramento.

The argument over the significance of the Manis mastodon is perhaps also complicated by a competing set of remains found at a site in Jefferson County, Mo. Though the Missouri mastodon remains were first noticed as far back as 1839, it wasn't until 1979 -- two years after the Manis find -- that scientists in Missouri reported finding a lone Clovis spear point among the bones.

The Missouri scientists say their discovery is "the first time archaeologists had found evidence of human weapons interspersed with the bones of these giant prehistoric beasts." It wasn't embedded in the bones, but it was a Clovis spear point -- a universally accepted style of stone weapon.

The problem with the Manis mastodon's stone point, Hurych said, was its crude nature. Some attacked it as not a human-fashioned weapon at all.

"I guess they think the mastodon must have fallen on it or something," he said.

Hurych said he's not going to take a position on the debate, except to say that his organization regards the Manis mastodon site as one of the most important sites among the 250 archaeological sites they own and manage.

Prehistoric human association with mammoths, the elephant-like creatures that evolved much later than the mastodons, has been less controversial among scientists.

As the evidence out of the Manis site continues to analyzed, Gustafson said, it's becoming increasingly difficult to deny human association. It's pretty clear, he said, that this was a place where ancient Americans butchered these beasts and worked the bones.

"More and more people are beginning to believe this," he said. Though retired, Gustafson is still working on the bones and the data collected at the site.

The Manises had lived in Sequim for two years when they stumbled upon the tusks. Emanuel Manis had been a precision machinist for Lockheed and also for the Stanford Linear Accelerator, one of the world's leading high-energy physics research institutions.

"We had a strong interest in science," said Manis Hatler. They moved to Sequim in 1975 and bought a bowling alley, intending to semi-retire. But after discovering the mastodon, they spent a decade or so managing an active archaeological dig.

"The Manises literally devoted their lives to this archaeological site," Gustafson said. "I think it's one of the most significant finds of the last century."

"They've hung with this all these years," said Hurych. There's much more yet to be found, he said, and the site may someday be re-opened to more study.

Topper Site

S.C. dig challenges theory of first Americans

Evidence suggests a diverse wave of migrants trekked here earlier than experts once believed . . .

By HENRY EICHEL Columbia Bureau [name of paper unknown -ed.]

MARTIN, S.C. -- From a pair of 6-foot-deep pits, a team of archaeologists and volunteers has spent the last month sifting hundreds of tiny stone flakes from the gray sand, trying to unravel one of the continent's oldest mysteries: Who got here first?

For decades, most scientists believed the first Americans were big-game hunters who crossed a now-disappeared land bridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia during the last ice age about 11,500 years ago. Supposedly, today's American Indians are all descended from these ancient people. But the discoveries at the Topper Site in rural Allendale County, about 85 miles southwest of Columbia, are part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn that theory.

Scientists are starting to believe that people may have arrived in the New World thousands to tens of thousands of years earlier, in many waves of migrations and from many different places. Stone Age America may have been a more crowded and racially diverse place than we thought.

At the heavily wooded dig site earlier this week, University of South Carolina professor Albert Goodyear opened a plastic bag and took out a pale yellow rock about the size of a person's little finger. Pointing to the stone's sharp, beveled edges, Goodyear said, "Nature can't make this; a human being has to do it very carefully. He would have had to take like a split beaver tooth, or a tiny hard bone with a sharp tip, and he'd have to pressure the flakes off. You've got to be good."

The person who worked this piece of rock camped at this spot between 12,000 and 18,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier, said Goodyear, director of the Topper excavations. That was a time when huge ice sheets covered what is now the northern United States, and South Carolina was a much colder place, with spruce and fir forests that resembled present-day Canada.

Mammoth and mastodon roamed the forests, as did now-extinct species of bison, camels and tiny horses. "They all would have been here," Goodyear said, "but whether these people used them or not, we don't know." Unlike some other prehistoric sites where archaeologists have found human skeletons, animal bones, charcoal from ancient campfires and even the remnants of huts, none of those things appear to have survived in the acidic soil at the Topper Site. All that has remained are hundreds of small stone blades and the rocks from which they were chipped.

"They're little razor blade-type things," Goodyear said. "People might have set several of them into a wooden or a bone handle and used it as a knife to cut something soft, like fish." They are identical to blades discovered in Siberia that have been proved to be 20,000 years old, he said. Little blades like that were also typically used to groove and splinter antlers, mastodon tusks and wood.

If one could ask these prehistoric people for their biggest artifact, Goodyear said, "they might produce a hardwood spear with a 4-inch long antler tip on it." But, he said, "We won't find any in these sands." This year's dig wraps up today, but Goodyear has his eye on a spot in the Savannah River swamp a half mile to the north, where geologists have dated a peat bog to 18,000 years. "If there are any antler or wood artifacts, they'll be preserved in peat," he said.

Some things can be safely assumed about the people who once camped here. They were hunter-gatherers, because at that time, that's what everyone in the world was. Agriculture didn't catch on in a big way until about 6,000 years ago. So, they wandered a lot, looking for food. They traveled light. They wouldn't have needed much in the way of shelter in the summer, although they may have made huts out of animal hides for the winter. Were they the ancestors of modern Indians?

"There's a good chance they weren't," said Goodyear. "Some of the skulls that are showing up (at other sites) are not the typical Mongoloid types. They could still be from Asia, but from an old archaic population that migrated into the Western Hemisphere and died off." Ted Tsolovlos, 52, of Columbia, one of the 15 volunteers at the site this week, said, "I think ice age man was probably closer to God, in a sense, and that there was something magical about that time. We're finding these certain little facts about this culture. How did they see the world?"

For the past two years, through USC's Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Goodyear has recruited volunteers from the public to sign up for a week or more to help with the excavation. They each paid $366, which included camping, lunch and dinner, evening lectures and a T-shirt. "I never thought I would enjoy digging in the dirt. But it's so much fun; you never know what you're going to find next," said Wanda Stover, a 48-year-old Bank of America officer from Charlotte who returned to the site for her second year.

In her pre-teen years, she said, she read Nancy Drew mysteries and other books set around archaeological digs and began a lifetime fascination with the subject. Then last year, she found the Topper Site expedition's Internet page and signed up. Goodyear will start taking applications for next year in January, giving preference to people who have been before. This year's 75 slots filled up by March.

For the next three weeks, geologists from around the country will comb the entire site, which is on land owned by Clariant Corp., a maker of industrial dyes. "They're going to interpret the age of the place based on the geological layers," Goodyear said. "That's a very important study that needs to be done for this site to gain widespread acceptance within the profession." Goodyear has been exploring the site since 1981. It's named for David Topper, a local landowner who first guided Goodyear and fellow USC archaeologist Thomas Charles to it. What made the heavily wooded hillside attractive to archaeologists were the outcroppings of chert, an impure form of flint. "You find a chert quarry, you'll find early man, because they were dependent on these rocks," Goodyear said.

Excavations since 1981 showed the quarry was a magnet for humans, with each layer of soil revealing an earlier culture. Two feet down, Goodyear found several 10,000-year-old spear points, and beneath those, some "blanks'' - rojectile points in their preliminary stages that had been broken and thrown away. "But I had never dreamed there was anything earlier," Goodyear said, because there weren't supposed to have been any people in North America before 11,000 years ago. But in 1998, Goodyear read in an archaeological journal about discoveries at a site called Cactus Hills, 45 miles southeast of Richmond, Va.

There, tests on charcoal from prehistoric campfires, along with stone tools and other evidence, showed that the site was occupied by humans at least 15,000 years ago. Earlier, in southern Chile, archaeologists had discovered the remnants of a 12,500-year-old hunting camp. That encouraged Goodyear to dig some deeper test holes. "In just a few hours," he said, "I was finding things I'd never seen before."

Proven: Man in America by 15,000 B.C.

Most people probably wouldn't have noticed it, but farmer Harold Conover in 1988 happened to see a stone spear point in the sand on a logging road near his farm in Carson, Va. Conover is not an archaeologist, but he recognized it as a Clovis spear point because there is a known Clovis site on his farm.

He tracked the point to a sand pit owned by the International Paper Co. at the Cactus Hill site, about 70 km south of Richmond, Va., overlooking the Nottoway River.

That chance discovery triggered a decade-long excavation that eventually might resolve the ongoing, often bitter controversy over when humans first migrated to North America. The spear point itself wasn't unusually old, but it led archaeologists Joseph and Lynn McAvoy to a prehistoric campsite that might be as many as 17,000 years old — 5,500 years older than the Clovis sites previously thought to be the oldest on this continent.

About 57-75 cm below the surface they found a campsite containing an ancient hearth, scrapers, woodworking tools and several Clovis spear points. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the hearth showed it to be about 10,900 years old, appropriate for a Clovis site.

Digging further, they found a second campsite about 10-15 cm lower, again with hearths and stone tools. The tools were distinctly different. Instead of quartzite Clovis spear points, the tools from the lower camp were made of chert and were of a more primitive form called blade flakes or core blades. Radiocarbon dating revealed the hearth was at least 15,000 years old and perhaps as much as 17,000.

The findings indicate that humans have lived in North America much longer than most researchers believed, and hint that their origins might be different from what had been believed.

Other archaeologists have made claims for a number of sites in both North and South America, some apparently dating as far back as 35,000 (Monte Verde) years. The dates of those sites, however, and the validity of the artifacts found there, are disputed.

Data presented last month by Joseph McAvoy and a team of archaeologists at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in Philadelphia seem to have firmly established the age of the Virginia site, called Cactus Hill.

"This is probably some of the oldest material in North America, if not the entire New World," said archaeologist Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The Cactus Hill site is one of several that are overturning the long-reigning theory of how humans first came to the Americas. Archaeologists always assumed that the first inhabitants walked across the Bering Strait to Alaska when ice covered its surface about 12,000 years ago.

Those first migrants quickly moved south, expanding their presence throughout the continent within as few as 500 years. That population is termed "Clovis" because its characteristic fluted spear points and other tools were first discovered near Clovis, N.M. The distinctive Clovis spear points have since been found throughout the continent and, recently, in Northeastern Asia as well, affirming the origin of these nomadic hunters.

Some archaeologists have identified other sites, such as the Meadowcroft rock shelter in Pennsylvania and the Topper site along the Savannah River in Georgia, that appear to be pre-Clovis. Their dates, however, have not been authenticated to everyone's satisfaction.

Others have found evidence that other populations might have migrated to the continent as well. Recent studies suggest that a seafaring population worked its way down the Pacific coast, establishing villages and fishing grounds on land that is now submerged. Some archaeologists believe that the same process occurred along the Atlantic coast as well.

Still, the dates of such events are questioned, and that is why the Cactus Hill site has assumed such importance. The McAvoys and their colleagues have produced dating evidence that might well be irrefutable, thanks in part to Conover's discovery.

When skeptics scoffed at Joseph McAvoy's claim that the Cactus Hill spear points were possibly 17,000 years old, McAvoy organized a team of at least 10 specialists and spent three years "challenging the conclusions" of his original report.

Paleobotanist Lucinda McWeeney of Yale, for example, identified the species of trees that were burned in the hearths. The pre-Clovis hearth contained remnants of white pine, while the Clovis hearths contained hard Southern pine. Trees in the area now are primarily hardwood hickory and oak. That progression of species corresponds with the gradual warming of the region since the last ice age.

She also was able to show that the charcoal in the lower hearths was not produced by a forest fire.

Soil scientist James C. Baker of Virginia Tech used a technique called luminescent dating to show that the sand at the site had not been disturbed over the millennia, suggesting that perturbation of the site by water or burrowing animals had not occurred.

Others were able to demonstrate the presence of distinctive plant fossils, called phytoliths, produced when plants on the surface are damaged, as by human activity. The amounts of phytoliths spiked at the levels of the campsites. The team also found high levels of phosphates in the soil at the levels of the sites. Phosphates are the detritus of human wastes and garbage.

"To me, the evidence is irrefutable," McAvoy said.

So, who were the pre-Clovis settlers?

"My first answer would be paleo-Indians who came across the Bering land bridge" earlier than had been thought, he said.

The Smithsonian's Stanford, however, thinks the tools are remarkably similar to somewhat older tools recently discovered in Spain and France. He suggests that those proto-Spaniards might have sailed across the Atlantic 18,000 years ago or more.

Not everyone is convinced. Archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University questions the fact that the two campsites discovered at Cactus Hill, separated in time by several thousand years, are separated in space by only 7-10 cm. "There should have been more soil-forming processes over that period," he said, so that the early site was more deeply buried.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

The Kon-Tiki Expedition