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The Hartley Site

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  • The Hartley Site

    Pretty interesting….

    “Our interpretation of the Hartley locality as a cultural site is consistent with other recent archeological discoveries placing humans in the Americas during or before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). These include multiple in situ human footprints from New Mexico that date from ∼22,860 to ∼21,130 cal BP (Bennett et al., 2021), and footprints from Argentina that date to ∼30,000 cal BP (Azcuy et al., 2021). Simple stone tools discovered in Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico, date from ∼26,500 to 19,000 cal BP and represent a previously unknown tradition (Ardelean et al., 2020; Becerra-Valdivia and Higham, 2020). At Coxcatlan Cave, Mexico, re-dating butchered small mammals associated with minimally worked stone tools established a 33,448 to 28,279 cal BP date for the site’s lowest cultural level (Somerville et al., 2021). Simple flaked stone artifacts are known from numerous ancient South American sites. These include Toca da Tira Peia, Brazil, which dates to ∼20,000 cal BP (Lahaye et al., 2013), and Vale da Pedra Furada, Brazil, which dates to ∼24,000 cal BP (Boëda et al., 2021); older artifacts dating to ∼32,000 cal BP are also reported from this site (Guidon and Delibrias, 1986; Guidon et al., 1994). At Toca do Serrote das Moendas, Brazil, faunal remains associated with human bones were dated to between ∼29,000 and ∼24,000 cal BP (Kinoshita et al., 2014). And at Arroyo del Vizcaíno, Uruguay, a fossil-rich 30,000 years old megafaunal locality with cut-marked bones (Fariña et al., 2014) adds to a growing record of probable human occupation sites in the Americas that predate arrival of the Native American clade by millennia.”…….

    …..“In summary, taphonomic and genomic evidence accord in detecting at least two founding populations for the Americas, and in viewing the story of Native Americans expanding into virgin country as “profoundly misleading” (Reich, 2018). The position of the Hartley site deep in the North American Western Interior suggests that the first human arrival in North America, whether overland or via a coastal route, occurred well before ∼37,000 years ago. The Hartley site shares much in common with Old World proboscidean butchering sites; it appears that while hunting technologies evolved steadily, butchering practices preserved more stable procedural efficiencies. The Hartley locality exemplifies new methods and nuanced criteria for diagnosing early human occupation sites in the archeological record. It raises provocative new questions about when, where, and how the Native American clade, with its unprecedented technology, intersected with earlier human occupants of the Americas. It also provides a new deep point of chronologic reference for occupation of the Americas, for attainment by humans of a global distribution, and a temporal recalibration of human ecological impacts across the Western Hemisphere.”

    Calibrating human population dispersals across Earth’s surface is fundamental to assessing rates and timing of anthropogenic impacts and distinguishing ecological phenomena influenced by humans from those that were not. Here, we describe the Hartley mammoth locality, which dates to 38,900–36,250 cal BP by AMS 14C analysis of hydroxyproline from bone collagen. We accept the standard view that elaborate stone technology of the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic was introduced into the Americas by arrival of the Native American clade ∼16,000 cal BP. It follows that if older cultural sites exist in the Americas, they might only be diagnosed using nuanced taphonomic approaches. We employed computed tomography (CT and μCT) and other state-of-the-art methods that had not previously been applied to investigating ancient American sites. This revealed multiple lines of taphonomic evidence suggesting that two mammoths were butchered using expedient lithic and bone technology, along with evidence diagnostic of controlled (domestic) fire. That this may be an ancient cultural site is corroborated by independent genetic evidence of two founding populations for humans in the Americas, which has already raised the possibility of a dispersal into the Americas by people of East Asian ancestry that preceded the Native American clade by millennia. The Hartley mammoth locality thus provides a new deep point of chronologic reference for occupation of the Americas and the attainment by humans of a near-g...
    Rhode Island

  • #2
    Just read this this morning , they keep finding more and more that goes further and further back.
    Searching the fields of NW Indiana and SW Michigan

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    • #3
      Thanks Charlie, The information on the six percussion flakes at the Hartley Mammoth Location was interesting.
      Michigan Yooper
      If You Don’t Stand for Something, You’ll Fall for Anything

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      • #4
        The paper is a good read.

        Those people were tough. Kill a mammoth, use its own bones to butcher it.
        Hong Kong, but from Indiana/Florida

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