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Rare Bone Raises Questions on Man's Arrival in Americas
Find in Mexico suggests that ancestors reached the New World much earlier than believed.
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.
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 archeologists 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. archeologists believed 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. Archeologists have proposed possible alternative routes to the Americas -- across the Pacific from Asia or Australia, across the Atlantic from Europe or Africa -- although 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 to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, so soon after the ice-free corridor opened from Asia to Alaska.
Argentine archeologist Laura Miotti agrees that 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 hand scraper 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 archeologists 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, although 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 that 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 pre-Clovis times.
"If you are trying to break through a barrier that is well established, you need well documented, incontrovertible proof," said archeologist Stuart Fiedel, author of a textbook on early Americans and a proponent of the Clovis-first model.
Both sides say 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 a curiosity.
Solorzano, 83, is a respected researcher who has taught generations of university students in the city of Guadalajara. His home office has a cabinet full of bones -- some of them human -- topped by 14 realistic models of hominid skulls.
Migration Mysteries
Cactus Hill, Virginia
At a site in Virginia called Cactus Hill, archaeologists have found an assemblage of artifacts that challenges scientific ideas about the first Americans. The conventional wisdom was that Native Americans are descended from a small band of people from northeast Asia who crossed over a now-vanished land bridge that extended between Siberia and Alaska between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago.
But the artifacts at Cactus Hill dated back to 16,000 B.C. What’s more, stone spear points found at the site are reminiscent of those made by a Stone Age culture in southwest France, called the Solutreans, that ended 18,000 years ago.
Archaeologist Dennis Stanford has suggested that the first Americans were actually the Solutreans, who crossed the Atlantic in boats similar to ones used by Arctic Eskimos. According to this controversial idea, the Solutreans were among the first New World explorers and may have been the ancestors of another ancient American culture, the Clovis people, who lived about 13,000 years ago.
In recent years, the idea that there may have been multiple migrations to the Americas by several groups of people beginning as far back as 16,000 or 18,000 years ago appears to be supported by a growing body of genetic, linguistic, and physical evidence.
Dhofar, Oman
The recent discovery of over a hundred sites in the Sultanate of Oman, located in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, could change how scientists think about the ancient migration of our ancestors out of Africa.
According to one idea, called the coastal expansion hypothesis, early modern humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago and spread throughout Europe and Asia by following the coastline. But stone spear points and other artifacts discovered at Oman that date to about 106,000 years ago suggest that a “Nubian Middle Stone Age” culture once thrived in southern Arabia.
The spear points appear to have been created using a technique similar to one used by a nomadic hunter-gatherer society from Africa’s Nile Valley known as the “Nubian Complex.” According to archaeologist Jeffrey Rose, the evidence from Oman provides a “trail of stone bread crumbs” left by early humans who migrated out of Africa and into Arabia by following a network of rivers inland. The climate in Arabia was tropical during the time the Stone Age humans lived there, scientists say, and would have been home to abundant freshwater and plentiful game such as gazelles and antelopes.
Kennewick Man
In 1996, a 9,300-year-old skeleton was accidentally discovered along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, during a hydroplane race. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers initially turned the skeleton over to a coalition of Native American tribes, who claimed Kennewick Man as their ancestor and who wanted to bury him according to tribal tradition. But scientists filed a federal lawsuit to gain permission to study the skeleton, and in 2004, a federal judge decided to grant the request after determining that the tribes could not prove a direct cultural affiliation with Kennewick.
An analysis of the skeleton in 2005 determined that Kennewick Man was purposefully buried and had suffered various physical traumas before dying in his mid-to-late 30s. He was a well-built individual, and his right arm was larger than his left, which likely resulted from frequent use of an atlatl, or spear thrower, which he and his contemporaries could use to hurl a spear up to the length of a football field to kill prey.
Some of the scientists who studied the Kennewick Man skeleton suggested his facial features were European, while others argue that his skull shape is most similar to a Japanese group called the Ainu. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and Genographic Project founder Spencer Wells says Kennewick is typical of other early (pre-8,000 years ago) American skulls in this regard; most of them exhibit features more typical of European populations than later remains.
Monte Verde, Chile
The Monte Verde archaeological site is located in the low mountains of southern Chile and has been dated to more than 14,000 years old. Artifacts discovered at the site include mastodon bones, charcoal-filled hearths, and wooden posts that once supported huts. Its discovery in the late 1970s suggested humans had not only arrived in the Americas a lot earlier than expected, but that they had also traveled a lot farther than anyone thought.
In 2008, archaeologists discovered bits of chewed up seaweed at the site that may have been used for food and medicine and which corroborate the dating of other artifacts at the site. Several different species of seaweed were discovered, which suggests that early Americans possessed a fairly sophisticated knowledge of coastal ecosystems.
Based on this evidence, some researchers have suggested that ancient humans spread across the Americas through a slow coastal migration down the Pacific Coast, instead of dispersing along strictly inland routes as had been traditionally thought. Archaeologist Tom Dillehay speculates that people could have moved in a “zigzag” pattern—taking inland detours to follow “thousands of temptations” along the way before returning back to the coast to continue their southward migration.
Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania
Located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter site is a rock ledge overhang that was used as a campsite by prehistoric hunters and gatherers some 16,000 years ago. Discovered in 1955, Meadowcroft Rockshelter is the oldest known site of human habitation in North America and its existence lends credence to the idea that humans arrived in the Americas earlier than traditionally thought. The site has yielded nearly two million artifacts, including ancient tools made of stone or bone, pottery fragments, and hundreds of fire pits. Animal and plant remains—including fruits, nuts, and seeds—have also been discovered at the site.
Stone Age India
After first leaving Africa, modern humans may have veered east to settle India some 76,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years before they are thought to have arrived in Europe. According to paleoanthropologist Michael Petraglia, who is developing the theory, early modern humans may have wiped out another human species, Homo heidelbergensis, which scientists think left Africa about 800,000 years ago and who was already living in India.
The scenario Petraglia envisions is eerily similar to what some scientists think happened in Europe about 30,000 years ago, with modern humans driving their close cousins the Neanderthals to extinction. The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of another species, Homo floresiensis (aka “the hobbits”), whose fossilized bones have been discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, Petraglia says.
Peking Man
In 2008, Chinese archaeologists claimed that a newly unearthed skull that dated back 80,000 to 100,000 years belonged to an early modern human. China’s government-run press hailed the discovery as “the greatest discovery in China after Peking Man”—a subspecies of Asian Homo erectus that was discovered in the 1920s and which for a time caused some anthropologists to suggest that China was the original homeland of humanity. (That idea was later discounted by discoveries in Africa.)
If the new skull did indeed belong to a modern human, it would have forced a radical rethink of theories about when our ancestors first left Africa because it would have indicated a very early dispersal of modern humans eastward from Africa and the Middle East. But other experts have discounted this idea, saying the Chinese skull resembles Peking Man more than it does modern humans.
A New Prehistory
By THOMAS D. DILLEHAY
BASIC BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books GroupCopyright © 2000 Thomas D. Dillehay. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-465-07668-8
Chapter One
Setting the Stage
Whence have they come? Have they remained in the same state since the creation of the world? What could have tempted, or what change compelled, a tribe of men to leave the fine regions of the north ... to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe? Such and many other reflections must occupy the mind of every one who views one of these poor savages.
—Charles Darwin, on the people of Tierra del Fuego,
The Voyage of the Beagle
Sometime after the emergence of Homo sapiens in the Old World, the forebears of Native Americans entered the previously uninhabited New World, eventually making their way southward to the cold, barren landscape of Tierra del Fuego—one of the last places on earth reached by prehistoric humans. When did this happen? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from? For decades, archaeologists felt sure they knew the answers: The first Americans were skilled hunters and toolmakers who arrived from northeast Asia around 11,200 B.P., moved rapidly through the Western Hemisphere, and within a few centuries had traversed the New World, while driving to extinction such big-game animals as ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, camels, and native horses. These migrating big-game hunters are known in scientific circles as the Clovis people, and the archaeological signatures they left behind are called the Clovis culture.
Epochal archaeological findings have recently overturned many aspects of this account, which is known as the Clovis theory. We now know that people were in the Americas long before 11,200 B.P., that they probably came several times from several parts of Asia, and they were not just big-game hunters. They had well-designed wood, bone, and stone technologies with which they exploited a wide range of foods, including plants, small game, and marine animals. Many of these new discoveries have taken place in South America. The first South Americans were clearly very different than their North American counterparts. Their culture was not uniform like Clovis; it was made up of a wide variety of regionally distinct cultures that predate Clovis times.
This book recounts the story of new scientific discoveries, conclusions, and controversies about the first Americans, with special emphasis given to the important South American archaeological evidence that recently has changed so many of our ideas. Particularly in the last twenty years, excavations in South America have raised exciting new ideas and questions about the first Native Americans. Much of this excitement revolves around several new conclusions spurred by the acceptance of the Monte Verde site. These are:
1. People were in South America by at least 12,500 years ago, implying that they must have been in North America by at least 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, if we accept migration into the Americas by way of land.
2. There were multiple early migrations into the Americas, probably from different points within Asia and possibly elsewhere.
3. Although late Pleistocene South American cultures are historically related to North American ones, they are also distinct, characterized by different technologies and generalized hunting and gathering lifeways.
4. Much cultural diversity existed throughout the Americas, but especially in South America, by 11,000 years ago. By that time the Americans had been in this hemisphere for some thousands of years, regional populations had grown geographically isolated, and they had rapidly and efficiently adapted to diverse environments.
5. There is some (though scant) evidence from human skeleton and genetic comparisons that regional populations were physically more different from one another than we once believed, suggesting not only early cultural but biological diversity. Both the cultural and biological records indicate that the first Americans were much more sophisticated and varied than we scientists had previously thought.
These conclusions add up to an entirely fresh view of the settlement of the New World—a world that archaeology has increasingly made a vital part of our common heritage. The story of this heritage begins with the question of when and where the first Americans found their way into this hemisphere.
THE DATING GAME AND CLOVIS CLONES
The appearance of Ice Age people in the Americas has always been a mystery. At the turn of the twentieth century, Archbishop Usher's date of 4,004 B.C. for the creation of the earth was still largely accepted, and Native Americans were believed to have descended from either Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, Irish, or from the ten lost tribes of Israel, or to have sailed to the Americas in historic times from the lost continents of Atlantis or Mu. We now know that the Native Americans are much older than any of these people or places, and we know that they probably migrated into the Americas from Asia. What we do not know is exactly when this migration occurred.
Indeed the question of when people first entered the Americas has produced much scholarly argument, in part because much more is at stake than a date. The date of entry has an important impact on our understanding of who the first Americans were, how they came to America, and how they adapted so efficiently to many different environments.
Since the findings of butchered mammoths at the Clovis site in New Mexico in the 1930s, most archaeologists have been convinced that the first Americans were nomadic hunters who moved rapidly to search for big game. The idea is that people equipped with the efficient Clovis spearpoints wandered from Siberia into Alaska, tracking animal herds as they moved across the open tundra of the Bering Strait (which was exposed by lowered sea levels). This initial migration probably took place sometime in the late Pleistocene (or Ice Age), which ended in different regions between 14,000 and 11,000 B.P. Eventually, the first Americans pursued other game southward until they reached temperate climates in the continental United States, and then they pushed even farther south to Tierra del Fuego. So goes the theory.
Under close inspection, however, the big-game Clovis theory has many problems. For instance, several recent excavations in various parts of the Americas show that early hunters also consumed less glamorous foods, such as turtles and other small game, aquatic plants, snails, insects, shellfish, and tubers. Also, evidence for the large numbers of herd animals needed to support the Clovis lifestyle is absent from many parts of the Americas, especially the forested regions of the eastern United States and Central America, as well as vast areas of South America. This lack of evidence does not mean that Clovis people were not hunters, but if they hunted in the forest, it would have taken more work.
Further, Clovis was a short-lived culture. All radiocarbon dates from Clovis sites in North America cluster tightly between 11,200 and 10,800 B.P. This tight span forces us to ask how humans could have reached the southern tip of South America by 11,000 B.P. How could people have populated an entire hemisphere in just 300 to 500 years—the time between the arrival in Beringia and the appearance of human-made artifacts in Tierra del Fuego? With the possible exception of the Arctic, there is no analogue anywhere in human history or prehistory for such rapid movement across such a vast and unknown region. Also, there are no clear archaeological traces of the Clovis culture in Alaska and Siberia. Where, then, did this culture originate? Were Clovis points perhaps invented in the lower forty-eight states? If so, then the Clovis theory does not even explain the peopling of North America. How, then, can it explain the first settlement of South America?
Still other lines of evidence have brought the Clovis theory into question. Linguists argue that modern North and South American indigenous languages probably evolved from a single ancestral tongue. But they also note that the languages of the north and the south differ greatly from one another and that it is hard to imagine how these differences could have evolved in just a few centuries. Led by Johanna Nichols, several historical linguists now claim that only a span of more than 30,000 years can explain the antiquity and diversity of New World languages as well as the differences between the languages of North America and South America. Similarly, the mitochondrial DNA of many present-day Native Americans differs so much from group to group that a single, relatively recent ancestral group seems unlikely. Many molecular anthropologists believe that the genetic diversity of New World peoples requires a human presence lasting more than 25,000 years. Others argue for a single arrival no earlier than 15,000 years ago.
So the consensus from many sources is that the Clovis model does not explain the peopling of the Americas. Although scholars are still far from broad agreement about the inadequacies of the Clovis theory or about an alternative to it, the broad strokes of a new picture of American origins are emerging. The evidence supporting this new picture comes from early sites all over the Americas but especially from sites in South America, including Monte Verde in Chile, Taima-Taima in Venezuela, Tequendama in Colombia, the Itaparica Phase sites in Brazil, and several coastal sites in northern Chile and southern Peru.
South America is very different archaeologically from North America because no single culture dominated the continent the way the Clovis culture, with its representative spearpoints, dominated North America. The first South Americans were not Clovis clones. In South America, the earliest technologies consisted of different kinds of stone tools, including a wide variety of spear-points, unifacial tools made of flakes, and sling stones. Furthermore, many areas in South America witnessed the development of broad hunter and gatherer diets before 11,000 B.P., a pattern usually thought to be associated with later Holocene or early Archaic cultures dated after 10,000 B.P. And big-game hunting was simply one of many different economic practices; it never achieved the importance it did in North America.
All of the South American sites mentioned above testify to varied patterns of technology and subsistence in different environments, including big-game hunting in grassy plains and savannas, generalized foraging in forests and parklands between at least 12,500 and 10,500 B.P., and active plant manipulation in some areas of South America by 10,000 B.P. (suggested by the presence of domesticates possibly as early as 9,000 to 8,000 B.P.).
Until recently, most specialists thought that it was only with the decline and extinction of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period and with the later increase of human populations that material cultures and subsistence patterns became more generalized. These changes were supposed to have occurred around 10,000 to 9,000 B.P., or at the beginning of the Holocene period. This time of generalized adaptation is called the Archaic period by American archaeologists, for whom the name denotes both a chronology and a way of life. Although the divide between the late Pleistocene and early Holocene period is essentially climatic (the retreat of those ice sheets), it is also conceived as a cultural watershed where the "Paleoindian lifeway"—specialized big-game hunting—gave way to the more generalized early Archaic hunting and gathering lifeway. Under the influence of this model, most work on the first inhabitants of South America has emphasized big-game hunting. Yet the evidence of many South American sites indicates that people in most areas of the continent combined what were probably sporadic large mammal kills with reliance on smaller game and plant resources.
Clearly the developmental sequence from big-game hunting in the late Pleistocene to diverse hunting and gathering in the early Holocene was not universal throughout South America, nor even throughout North America. A generalized, broad-spectrum economy existed at Monte Verde around 12,500 B.P. and in other areas by at least 11,000 B.P., although it differed from the classic and later Archaic period in that some people still hunted the soon-to-be-extinct big animals. This hunting, however, was only one activity among others. Specialized big-game hunting is evident only at a small handful of sites in South America.
Thus it is incorrect to refer to all early South American people as Paleoindians, a term best reserved for some North American groups. Yet because some early South Americans were hunting big animals that were not yet extinct, it is also incorrect to call them early Archaic people, a term more appropriately reserved for later cultures of the Holocene period. To avoid an overemphasis on the Paleoindian and Archaic lifestyles, I will call the South American late Pleistocene the proto-Archaic period, a term that reflects the time's highly diverse hunting and gathering economies and technologies.
This widespread cultural diversity evident in the archaeological record of South America probably had something to do with the relative lack of glaciers on the continent. Unlike North America, South American glaciers were confined to patchy high areas of the Andean mountains and to high latitudes near the southern tip of the continent. Immigrants coming to South America sometime before 13,000 years ago could have moved freely across the entire continent, and they probably settled early in many lush, temperate environments, a settlement pattern that spawned different hunter and gatherer adaptations and different regional cultures.
Between 12,500 and 10,500 B.P., South America saw many of the cultural developments typical of the late Pleistocene period elsewhere. People began to exploit coastal resources with a more sophisticated marine technology, concentrate their settlements in river valleys and deltas, and selectively use certain plants and animals. Later changes (between 10,500 and 9,000 B.P.) included most of those commonly considered typical of early Archaic economies (Mesolithic in the Old World)—more habitation sites, more use of plant foods that required care, more intensive exploitation of coastal resources, greater technological diversity, and the appearance of ritual practices and rock paintings. The first pulses of civilization in the form of permanently occupied sites, the appearance of architecture and art, and the use of plant and animal domesticates, may have occurred within just a few millennia after people first arrived in South America. As the last continent occupied by humans but one of the first sites of prehistoric civilization, South America offers an important study of rapid cultural changes. And once humans moved into the interior river corridors and coastal fringes of the continent, between 11,000 and 10,000 B.P., this development was rapid indeed.
What caused these sudden changes? Were they related to climatic shifts, internal developments within regional populations, the imitation of neighbors, or the arrival of new people on the scene? Or was the cause perhaps a combination of these factors, along with the exploitation of different foods and other resources in more lush environments? Or does the answer lie in the growing cultural experience, cognitive skill, social capacity, and constantly changing lifestyle of a population that had made a rapid migration down the entire length of the Western Hemisphere? The answers to these questions are crucial to our understanding of the first chapter of human history in the Americas and to the entire history of humankind.
THE COGNITIVE EXPLOSION
The story of human movement into the Americas begins in the Old World. Although people have been moving from place to place for more than 2 million years, modern Homo sapiens, beginning around 100,000 years ago, were the first to explore large territories and adapt to all continents. This experience itself must have had a profound impact on modern humans and the divergence and variety of regional cultures they developed. Having changed more during the period shortly after 40,000 B.P. than during the previous several million years, and after spreading throughout the Old World, people eventually brought their remarkable innovations into Australia and the Americas, where, in late Pleistocene times, they produced a wide variety of cultural patterns and regional histories. Of the many different histories made by our human ancestors, those made by the people migrating into the Americas, especially South America, represent the least known. They were the last people on earth to successfully colonize a continent.
Although anatomically modern humans lived in Africa and the Near East more than 100,000 years ago, it was not until roughly 40,000 B.P. that there occurred a sudden explosion of new kinds of stone and bone tools, artwork, and elaborate burials. This transformation of anatomically modern humans into behaviorally modern people, seems to have happened simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is the most dramatic advance in human evolution since hominids began to walk on two legs more than 3.5 million years ago.
Forty thousand years ago, our ancestors occupied much of the Old World, including the cold tundras of Pleistocene Europe and Asia. The human brain was of modern size. These people used primitive tools, but these tools had persisted essentially without change for tens of thousands of years. People showed concern for their fellow humans by burying the dead and taking care of the handicapped and injured. Then long patterns of development that had begun 2 million years earlier began to flower, bringing language and communication, ritual and ideology, social organization, art and design, settlement and technology. Tools and methods began to vary from region to region and became rapidly more sophisticated. More implements were made from a greater variety of raw material than ever before. Bows, boats, buttons, fishhooks, lamps, needles, nets, spear-throwers, and many other items appear in the archaeological record for the first time. The dog was domesticated as a hunting companion and occasional source of food. With the dawning awareness of art and image-making, caves and artifacts were decorated with paintings, carvings, and engravings. Sites from this period are larger and more common than those from previous periods, suggesting larger social groups, more economic activity, and perhaps rapid population growth. From almost any perspective, this period represents a dramatic change in human behavior.
The conquest of new territory accelerated sharply at the same time. Having spread to North Africa and the Near East by at least 100,000 B.P., anatomically modern people advanced slowly across Europe and Asia until they reached China, Japan, and Australia around 40,000 B.P. In some areas the newcomers replaced, and in others interbred with, other humans such as the robustly built Neanderthals. At 40,000 B.P. the movement into uninhabited landscapes accelerated. These people explored new continents and brought with them the basic cultural foundations of early American culture.
The causes of this remarkable migration and cultural explosion are a mystery. Some anthropologists suggest that a change in the brains of modern humans improved their linguistic ability, which led to more sophisticated cultures. Others emphasize the rapid change in people's social and economic organization, perhaps caused by some fundamental behavioral change. Either way, demographic changes and possibly food shortages compelled some humans around the world to abandon one way of life for another, and so to invent new technologies and lifestyles.
Still other researchers argue that the crucial element may have been the human species' extreme sociability, which created an environment conducive to sophisticated tools, language, and artwork. Evidence of the extensive social relations among early Homo sapiens in Europe, for instance, is everywhere. Starting around 40,000 B.P., our ancestors left behind the remains of large campsites, suggesting that they occasionally gathered in large groups, possibly for ceremonial purposes. Richard Klein and others believe that the huge leap in the sophistication of hunting techniques and fishing technologies reveals the beginning of intense cooperation among group members. Discoveries of shell, bone, and flint hundreds of miles from their original sources indicate that modern humans had vast networks for exchanging goods.
Cognitive skills, belief systems, and art probably played key roles in the development of a complex network of groups after people initially moved into new environments. Their learning capacity was obviously crucial to the way they adapted to new environments and developed new cultural patterns. But the belief systems of groups were probably equally important. These systems probably preserved some degree of community, an acceptance of the social system, and hence a general social solidarity, particularly in times of duress. Communal beliefs may also have functioned to store and transmit ancient knowledge as groups split up and entered new worlds.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SETTLEMENT OF THE AMERICAS by THOMAS D. DILLEHAY. Copyright © 2000 by Thomas D. Dillehay. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Monte Verde ist eine archäologische Stätte im Norden Patagoniens in der Nähe von Puerto Montt in Chile. Nach der Radiokohlenstoff-Datierung dürfte die Fundstelle etwa 14.800 Jahre alt sein, ein Beleg dafür, dass Amerika schon lange vor der sogenanntenClovis-Kultur besiedelt war.
Das Alter von Monte Verde widerspricht der lange akzeptierten "Clovis first" Theorie, die besagt, dass die ersten Menschen den amerikanischen Kontinent frühestens vor 13.500 Jahren besiedelten, und zwar mit dem Auftauchen der Clovis-Kultur. Die Befunde von Monte Verde wurden zunächst von den meisten Wissenschaftlern abgelehnt, aber in den letzten Jahren sind die Beweise derart gesichert, dass sie in archäologischen Kreisen nun weithin akzeptiert sind.
Die Anwesenheit von Menschen bei Monte Verde, so weit im Süden des amerikanischen Kontinents, wird mit dem weithin akzeptierten Modell der Migration entlang der Pazifikküste erklärt. Denn die archäologischen Funde zeigen, dass die Menschen von Monte Verde bereits 1.800 Jahre vor der Entstehung der Bering-Landbrücke ankamen, die erst ab etwa 13.000 Jahre vor heute passierbar war. Dies lässt die Wanderung entlang der Westküste des amerikanischen Kontinents als die plausibelste Erklärung für die frühesten Einwohner Chiles erscheinen. Paläoökologische Belege der Küstenlandschaft bei bei Monte Verde stützen ebenfalls dieses Modell, denn die Menschen konnten in dieser Landschaft vielseitige Nahrung finden.
Monte Verde wurde Ende 1975 von einem Studenten bei der Erkundung des Chinchihuapi Creek entdeckt, wo starke Erosion - wegen des hier stattfindenden Holzeinschlags - einen seltsamen "Kuh-Knochen" freilegte, der sich später als Knochen eines Mastodons erwies. Der chilenische Geologe Mario Pino und Tom Dillehay, die zu diesem Zeitpunkt an der Universidad Austral de Chile lehrten, begannen im Jahr 1977 mit der Ausgrabung von Monte Verde. Die Fundstelle befindet sich am Ufer des Chinchihuapi Creek, einem Nebenfluss des Flusses Maullin, 58 km vom Pazifischen Ozean entfernt. Sie ist eine der seltenen offenen Fundstellen in Amerika. Die Wasser des Chinchihuapi Creek stiegen kurze Zeit nach der Besielung von Monte Verde an und es bildete sich ein Torfmoor, das den bakteriellen Zerfall des organischen Materials hemmte. So wurden viele Artefakte und andere Gegenstände für Jahrtausende konserviert.
Tom Dillehay, heute an der University of Kentucky, setzt die Ausgrabungen bei Monte Verde seit zwei Jahrzehnten fort. Die Radiokarbondatierung von gut erhaltenen Kochen und Holzkohle ergaben ein durchschnittliches Alter von 12.500 Jahren (kalibriert), das sind über 1.300 Jahre mehr, als Untersuchungen der ältesten, zu dieser Zeit bekannten Fundorte auf dem amerikanischen Kontinent ergaben.
Bei der ersten Ausgrabung wurden zwei große Feuerstellen und einige kleinere gefunden. Neben Überresten der lokalen Tierwelt fand man auch Holzpfosten, die zu etwa zwölf Hütten gehört haben müssen. Daher glauben die Archäologen, dass Monte Verde von 20 - 30 Personen bewohnt wurde. Ein menschlicher Fußabdruck, in Ton konserviert, stammt vermutlich von einem Kind. Innerhalb des Lagers fanden die Archäologen ein Stück Fleisch, das noch DNA bewahrt hatte. Die Analyse ergab, dass es von einem Mastodon stammt, einer Elefantenart, auf die die Menschen von Monte Verde offensichtlich Jagd machten.
Monte Verde weist zwei unterschiedliche Schichten auf. Die obere Schicht trägt die Bezeichnung MV-II und wurde recht sicher auf ein Alter zwischen 13.800 und 14.800 Jahre datiert. Die untere Schicht MV-I ist weniger gut verstanden. Sie ist nicht so gut konserviert und besteht aus alten Flussablagerungen. Dillehay fand verstreut Holzkohle, die als Reste von Feuerstellen interpretiert werden können, aber auch mögliche Artefakte aus Stein und Holz. Diese wurden auf mindestens 33.000 Jahre v. Chr. datiert, doch Dillehay selbst bleibt bei der Interpretation von MV-I vorsichtig.
In der Ausgabe vom 9. Mai 2008 des Wissenschaftsjournals Science berichtet ein Team von Forschern über neun Arten von Seetang und Meeresalgen, die in einigen Feuerstellen und anderen Bereichen der Siedlung identifiziert werden konnten. Die Algenproben konnten direkt auf ein Alter zwischen 14.220 bis 13.980 Jahre datiert werden, was erneut bestätigt, dass die Schicht MV-II von Monte Verde mehr als 1.000 Jahre älter ist als alle anderen, zuverlässig datierten Siedlungen von Menschen in Nord-und Südamerika.
Literatur
- Dickinson, W.R. 2011. Geological perspectives on the Monte Verde archeological site in Chile and pre-Clovis coastal migration in the Americas. Quaternary Research, 76, pp. 201-210.
- Collins, M., Dillehay T. Early cultural evidence from Monte Verde in Chile. Nature. 332. (1988): 150-152.
- Dillehay TD, Ramírez C, Pino M, Collins MB, Rossen J, Pino-Navarro JD. 2008. Monte Verde: seaweed, food, medicine, and the peopling of South America. Science 320 (5877): 784–6. DOI:10.1126/science.1156533
Koordinaten
- -41.504723° N, -73.204445° E von Henry Gilbert,
Das könnte Dir auch gefallen
THE SEARCH FOR EARLY HUMANS
IN AMERICA
Please CLICK on highlighted sections for detail:
This site records efforts and recent findings in the quest for traces of the earliest human colonizers in America and to determine whether one of our distant ancestors, Homo erectus, also dispersed into America.
Estimates of the earliest dates of human colonization in America area have traditionally varied between 12,000-16,000 BP, the latter occurring at Monte Verde, Chile. These have been based largely on the presence of a unique American invention, the Clovis Point. However, recent mitochondrial DNA data point to much earlier dates being possible, e.g., 40,000 BP. These data reveal three or four distinct migrations of humans to the Americas, and a fifth mysterious migration indicated from data collected among the Ojibwa Amerindian group in the Great Lakes region of North America. This group, called “X” had obtained genetic variation that is found in certain areas of northern Europe, which may have been contributed by copper-seeking Scandinavians at the end of the Bronze Age (see Bronze). Although archeological evidence and remains of prehuman Homo erectus are known from Eurasia, Africa and Asia, none has been verified in The Americas. This may be due in part because specific searches for such evidence are few in America. Nevertheless, recent findings are revealing the possible existence of tools and other artifacts left by Homo erectus. One site in San Bernardino County, California, The Calico Dig, has come up with suspicious findings, albeit they are difficult to verify (Dr. D. Simpson, personal communication).
There are ongoing discoveries in Midwestern and Eastern North America of Homo sapiens occurrence that are of great interest. For example, a site in Indiana contains obvious points, and flaked chips, some so-called “microchips” and a couple of axe heads, many with stylized patterns and consistent markings and carvings that do not seem to be attributable to natural causes [see Indiana Site]. There are many stones with 1-2 cm. carved shapes of humans, animals and possibly some primitive writings. Numerous carvings of the American Lion (see Lions), the American horse and cameloids point to an early Pre-Classic date for this site. Yet these animals were all presumed to have become extinct by the end of the Pleistocene around 9,000 B.C.! [see Extinct]. A site along the Savannah River of southern United States is producing dates that exceed 40,000 BC as well as other sites in South America (see Savannah). There is conclusive evidence for the hunting by humans during the Pleistocene (See: Mammoths, Camelids, & Lions).
It is now well known that “Stick Writings,” some called Ogam, appear all over the North American Continent. The works of Barry Fell have been well documented (See Report) and the recent translation of the Horse Creek Petroglyph in West Virginia by Edo Nyland (See Report) attest to the literacy of people traveling in America during the past several thousand years. Yet these translations are restricted to stationary sites such as petroglyphs appearing on rock faces. There has been no translation of stick writings on smaller stone objects. [Also see Ogam Script]
Bischoff, J. C., M. Ikeya & F. E. Budinger. 1984. TL/ESR study of the hearth feature of the Calico archeological site,
California. Amer.Antiquity, Wash., DC. 49(4): 764-774.
Tech. Rept., Wash., D.C.
Relands, CA. Vol. 36, No. 3.
The Incredible Human Journey
| The Incredible Human Journey | |
|---|---|
Title card
| |
| Genre | Documentary |
| Presented by | Alice Roberts |
| Theme music composer | Ty Unwin |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Originallanguage(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 5 (list of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executiveproducer(s) | Kim Shillinglaw |
| Producer(s) | Paul Bradshaw |
| Running time | 300 minutes (five episodes of 60 mins each) |
| Productioncompany(s) | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Two |
| Original release | 10 May – 14 June 2009 |
| External links | |
| Website | |
The Incredible Human Journey is a five-episode, 300 minute, science documentary film presented by Alice Roberts, based on her book by the same name. The film was first broadcast on BBC television in May and June 2009 in the UK. It explains the evidence for the theory of early human migrations out ofAfrica and subsequently around the world, supporting the Out of Africa Theory. This theory claims that all modern humans are descended from anatomically modern African Homo sapiens rather than from the more archaic European and Middle Eastern Homo neanderthalensis or the indigenous Chinese Homo pekinensis, and that the modern African Homo sapiens did not interbreed with the other species of genus Homo.
Each episode concerns a different continent, and the series features scenes filmed on location in each of the continents featured. The first episode aired onBBC Two on Sunday 10 May 2009.[1]
Contents
Synopsis[edit]
1. Out of Africa[edit]
In the first episode, Roberts introduces the idea that genetic analysis suggests that all modern humans are descended from Africans. She visits the site of theOmo remains in Ethiopia, which are the earliest known anatomically modern humans. She visits the San people of Namibia to demonstrate the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In South Africa, she visits Pinnacle Point, to see the cave in which very early humans lived. She then explains that genetics suggests that all non-Africans may descend from a single, small group of Africans who left the continent tens of thousands of years ago. She explores various theories as to the route they took. She describes the Jebel Qafzeh remains in Israel as a likely dead end from a crossing of Suez, and sees a route across the Red Sea and around the Arabian coast as the more probable route for modern human ancestors, especially given the lower sea levels of the past.
2. Asia[edit]
In the second episode, Roberts travels to Siberia and visits an isolated community of indigenous people who still practicereindeer hunting. With reference to them, she asks how ancient Africans could have adapted to the hostile climate of northern Asia, and why Asian people look so different from Africans.
Roberts then explores an alternative to the Out of Africa theory, the multiregional hypothesis that has gained support in some scientific communities in China. According to this theory, the Chinese are descended from a human species calledHomo erectus rather than from the Homo sapiens from which the rest of humanity evolved. Roberts visits the Zhoukoudiancaves, in which Peking Man, the supposed Homo erectus ancestor of the Chinese, was discovered. Roberts notes that some Chinese anthropologists and palaeontologists have shown modern Chinese physical characteristics in the fossil skulls, such as broad cheek bones, cranial skull shape and shovel-shaped incisors that are absent in almost all other humans. She also notes that the stone tools found in China seem more primitive than those elsewhere, and infers that they were made exclusively by Homo erectus. However, she argues that the skull evidence is only subtle. She interviews an American palaeontologist, who presents his hypothesis that the ancient Chinese humans used bamboo instead of stone, explaining the absence of sophisticated stone tools, despite the absence of archaeological evidence to support this hypothesis. Finally, Roberts interviews Chinese geneticist Jin Li, who ran a study of more than 10,000 individuals scattered throughout China from 160 ethnic groups. The study initially hypothesised that the modern Chinese population evolved from Homo erectus in China but concluded that the Chinese people did in fact evolve and migrate from Africa like the rest of world's population.
3. Europe[edit]
In the third episode, Roberts describes the various waves of anatomically modern humans that settled the continent ofEurope. She crosses the Bosphorus and travels up the Danube River, following their likely route. She then describes the already resident population of Neanderthals, and visits Gibraltar, the last known site occupied by Neanderthals. She suggests that the principal difference between them and Homo sapiens was the latter's ability to create art, and visits thecave paintings at Lascaux. She discusses the theories about why Europeans have white skin and describes the birth ofagriculture and the societal changes that took place as a result, visiting the spectacular Neolithic temple at Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Turkey.
4. Australia[edit]
In the fourth episode, Roberts discusses the evidence of the Mungo Lake remains, which suggest, unexpectedly, that humans reached Australia long before they reached Europe, even though Australia is further away from Africa. Roberts attempts to trace the journey. She visits a site at Jwalapuram in India that appears to indicate that humans were present there 70,000 years ago, before the Toba supervolcano deposited ash on the site. She then points to the Negrito Semangpeople of Southeast Asia, who look different from other Asian peoples, and who may be descendants of the peoples who first left Africa. She describes the discovery of the tiny Homo floresiensis on Flores and suggests that they may have been exterminated by modern humans. She describes the crossing of the Torres Strait by experimenting with a bamboo raft. She concludes by visiting a tribe in Northern Australia whose mythology describes their mother goddess arriving from across the sea.
5. The Americas[edit]
In the final episode, Roberts describes theories about how humans traversed from Asia to the Americas, asking how they achieved it during the Ice Age, when the route to North America was blocked by ice walls. She describes the traditional theory that the first Americans were the Clovis culture, who arrived through an ice-free corridor towards the end of the Ice Age 13,000 years ago. However, she then visits archaeological sites in Texas, Brazil, the Californian Channel Islands andMonte Verde in southern Chile, which show 14,000-year-old human remains, proving that humans must have arrived earlier by a different route. She shows the skull of the Luzia Woman, found in Brazil, which displays Australasian features rather than the East Asian features of modern Native Americans; an archaeologist explains that these first Americans may have been Asians who migrated before Asians developed their distinctive facial features. Roberts shows that the earliest Americans may have migrated down the relatively ice-free western coastlines of North and South America. She concludes by noting that, when Europeans arrived in 1492, they did not recognize Native Americans as fully human, but that modern genetics and archaeology proves that we all ultimately descend from Africans.
Episodes[edit]
| Episode | Episode title | Airdate | Viewers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Out of Africa" | 10 May 2009 | 2.22m (9.7%)[2] |
| 2 | "Asia" | 17 May 2009 | 2.34m (10.2%)[3] |
| 3 | "Europe" | 24 May 2009 | 1.66m (7.2%)[4] |
| 4 | "Australia" | 31 May 2009 | 2.11m (9.9%)[5] |
| 5 | "The Americas" | 14 June 2009 | 1.86m (8.7%)[6] |
(No episode was broadcast on 7 June 2009, which was occupied largely by coverage of the European Parliament electionresults.)
International broadcast[edit]
Overseas, this programme was titled Human Journey and edited down to 51 minute episodes without Roberts' scenes or narration. Instead, voice-work was provided by the BBC's Tessa Wojtczak.[citation needed][why?]
- In Australia, this programme aired on ABC1 each Thursday at 8:30pm from 11 March 2010.[7] It has since been repeated in HD on BBC Knowledge.[8]
- In Canada, this programme screened on CBC News Network each Wednesday at 10pm E/P in The Passionate Eyetimeslot from 13 October 2010.[9]
Merchandise[edit]
The Region 2 DVD was released on 8 June 2009.[10]
The Region 4 DVD was released on 24 March 2010 (original UK broadcast episodes).[11]
The Region 1 DVD was released on 24 August 2010 (original UK broadcast episodes).[12]
The book accompanying the television series is: Roberts, Alice (2009). The Incredible Human Journey. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 0-7475-9839-8.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ "Where it all began – The Incredible Human Journey".Bristol University. 2009-05-08. Retrieved 2009-05-21.
- ^ "'Secret Millionaire' ends run with 2.2m". Digitalspy. 2009-05-11. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
- ^ "'Lost' finale attracts 800,000 for Sky1". Digitalspy. 2009-05-18. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
- ^ "First 'Talent' semi pulls in 11.8 million". Digitalspy. 2009-05-26. Retrieved 2009-05-26.
- ^ "'House' return attracts 676,000 for Sky1". Digitalspy. 2009-06-01. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
- ^ "Promising start for Alan Carr chatshow". Digitalspy. 2009-06-15. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
- ^ "ABC1 Programming Airdate: Human Journey (episode one)". ABC Television Publicity. Retrieved 2011-01-21.
- ^ "BBC Knowledge Programme Summary: Human Journey". BBC Knowledge Online. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
- ^ "CBC News Network Episode Listing: Human Journey".CBC Television. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ^ "BBC Shop: The Incredible Human Journey DVD". BBC Shop Online. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ^ "ABC Shop: The Incredible Human Journey DVD". ABC Shop Online. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ^ "The Incredible Human Journey DVD". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
External links[edit]
- The Incredible Human Journey – Official site.
- The Incredible Human Journey at BBC Programmes
- The Incredible Human Journey at DocuWiki.net.
- The Incredible Human Journey on IMDb
- The Incredible Human Journey at Amazon.com.
- The Incredible Human Journey – video search on YouTube.
- The Incredible Human Journey – video search on Dailymotion.
- Alice Roberts' official website
- Human Timeline (Interactive) – Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History (August 2016).
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