San Diego Natural History Museum Paleontologist Don Swanson pointing at a large horizontal mastodon tusk fragment.
Wired reports on a fossil find near San Diego from the 1990s that may completely upset the chronological apple cart.
In 1993, construction workers building a new freeway in San Diego made a fantastic discovery. A backhoe operator scraped up a fossil, and scientists soon unearthed a full collection of bones, teeth, and tusks from a mastodon. It was a valuable find: hordes of fossils, impeccably preserved. The last of the mastodons—a slightly smaller cousin of the woolly mammoth—died out some 11,000 years ago.
But the dig site turned out to be even more revelatory—and now, with a paper in the journal Nature—controversial. See, this site wasn’t just catnip for the paleontologists, the diggers who study all fossils. It soon had archaeologists swooping in to study a number of stone tools scattered around the bones, evidence of human activity. After years of debate over the dating technology used on the mastodon, a group of researchers now believes that they can date it and the human tools to 130,000 years ago—more than 100,000 years earlier than the earliest humans are supposed to have made it to North America.
The researchers expect a bit of controversy from a discovery that pushes back the arrival of humans in North America by a factor of ten.
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John
It is only a matter of time before fossil dating methods are thrown up in the air, and the academics scramble to rewrite the pre-historic narrative to suit their own philosophy and funding sources. Science is truly broken; from the pseudo-scientific religion of CAGW, to physics (string theory), to health and nutrition (fat, sugar, salt, starch, fiber), to ‘evolutionary biology,’ anthropology, paleontology, and archaeology. Are we still to believe that all human life on earth has descended from one, single place in Africa, from one, single forebear, Lucy? Are we to reject alternate theories of evolution in favor of Darwin’s glib text, when we can’t even reconcile the two most important theories of basic physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics? Such crap. Of course man was in North America long before 9,000 B.C.
Seattle Sam
Clearly a result of Mastadonogenic global warming.
GoneWithTheWind
Waves of immigration from Asia and possibly Europe too. So much confusion and misinformation. Partly because new immigrant groups would often have to fight and enslave older immigrants to survive and this pretty much erased the history and evidence of the previous culture. This undoubtedly happened many times and helps explains the significant cultural and physical differences between the various “indigenous” tribes. I doubt we will ever uncover all the threads to this mystery.
DLJ
To many, theories are as only valid as the extent and source of the funds provided to generate them.
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