50,000 Years Ago in South Carolina

[CMD]

Don't imagine this will go down smoothly....

http://www.postandcourier.com/20160521/160529887/topper-site-find-reveals-people-were-here-long-before-previously-thought

[sneakygroundbuzzard]

interesting read

i for one dont buy that whole "clovis first" hypothesis

[Soulful 1]

Couldn't agree with you more !

[sailorjoe]

My gut feeling 40 years ago that the idea of Clovis first was so much B.S. (i.e. baloney stuff). If Clovis had been first and had come from Asia/Siberia then there would have been tons of fluted points over there., but nada, zip, zero, nothing. People have been here for a long time and they continued to come. Not just like a bunch of those old guys came over and then what we have now is the result of one big migration. People came to this hemisphere over thousands of years. The Eskimos of the north were some of the more recent, but instead of heading south they headed east across Canada and into Greenland.

[Kyflintguy]

Oh, boy! That's pretty intense, I wouldn't have been surprised at all by number like 20,000 years..... This should be interesting. Not going to hold my breath though.
If they have actually found a site with indisputable evidence that old, it would be time for a revival in North American Archaeology. Time to break out those shovels and dig deeper pro's!

[sailorjoe]

Yes, indeedy!

[painshill]

It will be interesting to see where he publishes (because that will determine the level of peer-review required). That’s why controversial archaeological claims tend to get publicised via press releases to the popular media rather than by submitting papers to professional publishers.

In essence, this is exactly what Albert Goodyear claimed 12 years ago when he “announced” that he had found carbonised plant material from Topper, radiocarbon dated to “approximately 50,000 years ago” and in direct association with “pre-Clovis” lithic tools.

The problems he faces for the dating on this this work (among many other problems) will be exactly the same as last time. It could not be demonstrated that the carbonised material was from anything other than a natural fire and the radiocarbon dating technique was treated with scepticism. It will therefore also be important to know the exact technique used here and the competence level of the laboratory concerned. It isn’t just a case of handing a sample over to a lab and saying: “here you go, can you radiocarbon date this please?”

The problem with conventional radiometric carbon dating is that once you get beyond about 40,000 years there isn’t usually enough carbon-14 left to reliably measure and once you get to 50,000 years the sample is usually “radiocarbon dead” and the results are meaningless. That’s generally regarded as the upper limit of usefulness for the technique. It is sometimes possible to get to 60,000 years in very special circumstances and with highly specialised preparation techniques. The alternative technique used these days (if costs permit) is AMS radiocarbon dating which can comfortably take you to a 60,000 year upper limit and potentially occasionally beyond that. Apart from the high cost, the main issue (which can be both an advantage and a disadvantage) is that it relies on a much smaller sample such that contamination can skew the results.

It isn’t mentioned which technique was used or who carried out the work, but the methodology and expertise required for reliability will need to satisfy a high level of scientific scrutiny.

[chase]

I am all for pushing the limits, but a gap of that magnitude between cultures makes no sense. I am saying this should be toppled and not a topper. JMO

[CMD]

I am all for pushing the limits, but a gap of that magnitude between cultures makes no sense. I am saying this should be toppled and not a topper. JMO

I don't think we can really know if it makes sense or does not without knowing everything there is to know about human migration in the very distant past. It is indeed a huge gap, but a much earlier migration, followed by a huge gap, may be the case if it eventually demonstrated that it describes the facts. But we are a long, long way from understanding perfectly the nature and forms of human migrations once we left Africa. We are such a long way from having a perfect picture, and we may never arrive at that perfect picture. Goodyear's thinking really seems to be an outlier, both in terms of what ideas he is willing to entertain, and in terms of his "evidence" being seen as solid by those not as willing to see as far outside of the box as he himself does. The problems as Roger has described them, in other words. I simply don't know if presence 50,000 years ago, followed by a huge gap, makes sense or not. And it 's because it's not for me to say, lol. If it happened that way, then "making sense" does not come into play. What is, is. What was, was. We'll have to see if Goodyear's evidence is good or not. I guess my point would be that if it is good evidence, it would not matter if I thought it made sense or not.

[Ron Kelley]

My 2 Cents: We will probably never have evidence of the first people to arrive in the Americas. Do I believe that the first people to arrive in America populated the Americas? No! How many people migrated to America before they survived and thrived to multiply to a great number?

[gregszybala]

I've read a couple of articles on this and it appears there is also a lot of doubt as to whether the artifacts found are actually artifacts or just natural debris.
It will be interesting to see how peer review goes and if old school archies will accept even if all results come back positively identified as actual artifacts or used by man.
It will also be interesting to see how all of this evolves as more and more earlier sites get discovered.
I don't follow DNA studies enough to keep up on who the first peoples here are related to, but wouldn't that have quite a bit to do with who, where and when the first peoples of the Americas came from?

[painshill]

I've read a couple of articles on this and it appears there is also a lot of doubt as to whether the artifacts found are actually artifacts or just natural debris.
It will be interesting to see how peer review goes and if old school archies will accept even if all results come back positively identified as actual artifacts or used by man.
It will also be interesting to see how all of this evolves as more and more earlier sites get discovered.
I don't follow DNA studies enough to keep up on who the first peoples here are related to, but wouldn't that have quite a bit to do with who, where and when the first peoples of the Americas came from?

Yes... the "artefacts" (in this stratum) are in dispute, although there are other less disputable artefacts in the upper strata which probably date to around 3,000 years before Clovis.

There are no human remains (as of yet) for DNA analysis (even assuming they didn't fall foul of NAGRA), but... even if there were... it comes back to the point Ron made above. "First arrivers" is not necessarily the same thing as "founding population."

[sailorjoe]

Maybe I missed something here (which is often the case with me) but who disputes the artifacts as being genuine. Are they people who have examined them or is it people who have never seen them but have an opinion, nevertheless. There are many in academia that are quick to condemn based only on their own experience. The points made about the reliability of C-14 dating on things that old can be very "iffy" and those the assumptions being made about the age of the artifacts should be very tentative to say the least. That there are pre-Clovis material, I have little doubt. But 50,000 years old is a big stretch considering what we can be certain of at this time.

[painshill]

They’re disputed (the “artefacts” from the claimed 50,000 year old strata) in the sense that those outside Goodyear’s immediate team who have had the opportunity to see them are not convinced that they exhibit sufficiently distinctive features to demonstrate conclusively that they are of human manufacture or that a 50,000 year old provenience is proven. It's not known whether Goodyear now has (and intends to publish) additional and more convincing finds or "more of the same".

You might be interested in Doug Sain’s 2015 dissertation “Pre Clovis at Topper (38AL23): Evaluating the Role of Human versus Natural Agency in the Formation of Lithic Deposits from a Pleistocene Terrace in the American Southeast” available for free download here:

http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3466/

Be forewarned that it’s a 78 Megabyte download and heavy-going reading at over two and a half thousand pages but here’s a snippet from page 567:

“Evidence from this study supports King’s (2011) findings and demonstrates a human origin for the pre Clovis conchoidal flake assemblage at the site. However, this assemblage likely resulted from flake core and flake tool manufacture as opposed to biface manufacture and furthermore does not reflect bioturbation as an agent responsible for deposition. The assemblage is at minimum 14,000 BP and possibly much older. The bend break assemblage from the Lower Pleistocene Sands and Upper Pleistocene Terrace at Topper are also considered products of human agency based on the presence of specific technological attributes (compression rings, lips), retouch modification, and lack of differentially weathered scars.”

The study is extremely comprehensive, but this kind of detailed analysis has not yet been conducted (or if it has, then not yet published) on the pieces claimed to be from much older deposits.

There’s not much doubt about pre-Clovis assemblages and relatively strong evidence for “pioneer” Clovis technology back to at least 14,000 BP (and less conclusively for 16,000 – 20,000 BP) but not for the 50,000 year old claim. The burden of proof has to be with Goodyear… not the other way round.

[sailorjoe]

Many thanks for the reference you sited. I will try to get at it (but not tonight). Yes, the burden of proof is on Goodyear. This coming year should prove to be very interesting in this area of North American anthropology and archaeology. I'm eager to see what develops.

[SDhunter]

I enjoy reading these discussions even though I can't add my two cents.