pete wrote:
In sci.anthropology.paleo, on 28 Feb 2007 08:21:25 -0800,

Clovis has washed up from unknown sources on beaches from out at sea,
so Clovis has been demonstrated offshore, where are the pre-Clovis
artifacts, why don't they wash up also?

I'm rather interested in that. I know you've mentioned before
points being exposed in shoreline sediments, but are you

Here are some coastal Clovis sites to look at.

http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/mt.php

http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/mt.php?n=4|13

http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/mt.php?n=4|18

http://www.centerfirstamericans.org/mt.php?n=1|19

The Clovis points found in Venezuela are also coastal Caribbean, but
were found on a very narrow peninsula, the article I have doesn't say
if they were on a beach or not.

suggesting that Clovis points have been found which have
apparently come from sub-sea-level sites? Doesn't this push
their inception date back?

First someone is going to have to prove anyone came down the coastal
route for sure. Then dating underwater sites will be even harder to do
than on land, so who knows?

On Feb 28, 9:21 am, "Lee Olsen" <paleoc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
snip
But the Continental Shelf is not
the same distance from land
now
everywhere on the Iberian Peninsula,
so the sea in some areas was
just as close (or within reason) then as it is now.
snip

Lee, please give us your definition of "continental shelf".
The standard definition has the continental shelf
immediately adjacent to land, but you would have it
at some distance from land, so
I don't know what you're talking about.

Perhaps you have confused "continental shelf"
(the part of the sea floor immediately
adjacent to the seashore that has been either
exposed land or shallow water at some time in the past)
with "continental slope"
(the other margin of the continental shelf, where
water depth increases rapidly, and slope angles are
much steeper than on the continental shelf above
or the abyssal plains below).
Please tell us what you were talking about,
and what it was that the sea was just as close to.

-
Daryl Krupa

On Feb 23, 6:09 am, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <ston...@ozemail.com.au
wrote:
New evidence -- Clovis people not first to populate North America
COLLEGE STATION -- The belief that the Clovis People were the first to populate North America some 11,500 years ago has been widely challenged in recent years, and a Texas A&M University anthropologist has found evidence he says could be the final nail in the coffin for the Clovis first model.

Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, is the lead author of the paper "Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americas," that appears in the Feb. 23 (Friday) issue of Science.

Waters' paper revises the original dates for the Clovis time period, suggesting that humans likely inhabited the Americas before Clovis, who have long been considered to be the first inhabitants of the New World.

"It was always argued that Clovis represented the first people who came to the Americas," Waters says. "The new dating that we did indicates that the Clovis Complex ranges from 11,050 to 10,900 radiocarbon years before the present."

"Slowly but surely, archaeologists have been questioning whether Clovis represents the earliest people to enter the Americas."

To properly understand the age of Clovis, Waters and co-author Thomas Stafford of Stafford Research Laboratories in Colorado, tested samples from various Clovis sites in an effort to re-date some of what Waters says were poorly dated sites.

Because of technological advances, Waters says that he and Stafford were able to more precisely pinpoint the dates for some of the more than 25 dated Clovis sites that were excavated in North America.

"Many of these radiocarbon dates were run back in the 1960s and 1970s when radiocarbon technology wasn't what it is today," says Waters. "Many of the dates obtained from these sites had ranges on them of plus or minus 250 years. We can now get to plus or minus 30 years."

What Waters and Stafford found when they did their testing were radiocarbon dates that showed the Clovis time range wasn't as long as had been previously thought. Their tests placed the Clovis time frame between 11,050 radiocarbon years before present to approximately 10,800 radiocarbon years before present.

"It was a surprise," Waters says of the results. "And I think people are going to be surprised by the dates."

Waters says those dates show that Clovis was no more than 200 to 400 calendar years long, making it almost impossible for the Clovis people to spread as far as previously thought in such a short time span. They would, at most, have had to be prehistoric jet-setters to cover the ground in this amount of time.

"Once you realize that the Clovis Complex dates much younger than previously thought and that Clovis has a much shorter duration than we thought, you have to ask how could people, in such a short period of time, reach the tip of South America." Waters says. "It doesn't make any kind of anthropological sense that these people could have been moving that fast, nor would they have wanted to move that fast. And it seems highly unlikely, given 20 generations, they could have made it that far that quickly."

To re-date the sites, Waters requested samples for dating from different researchers who had excavated Clovis sites. He then sent the radiocarbon samples to Stafford who put them through a process where the bone is dissolved and bone collagen is extracted.

The collagen was put in a molecular sieve where it worked its way down through the sieve. Once this was complete, Stafford was left with purified amino acids from the bone. The highly chemically-pure sample was processed into a target and dated using an atomic accelerator.

The revised ages that Waters and Stafford obtained overlap dates from a number of North American sites that are technologically and culturally not Clovis sites, further bringing into question whether the Clovis People were the first humans in the Americas.

"The long-range implications of our study is that it will get scientists looking for pre-Clovis evidence with a lot more vigor and thinking differently about Clovis," Waters says. "This will force us to develop a new model to explain the peopling of the Americas."

Source: Texas A&M Universityhttp://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/tau-nec022007.php

--
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Greeting's Im new to this group and as well this topic
I would like to thank Robert for sharing the wonderful
perspectives of > Michael Waters, director of the
Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M
It is a great arguement or therory if you will
Allow referral as such. I am in the total belief of clovis
not being the first. however as Dr.waters argument
of in which as to why the pacific coast was travled as fast
cannot concede to racing in front of the pacific north and southern
were into the last of the iceage. in what could have created the
land bridge from russian to Alaskan coast to bring the clovis
tools here and so agree with a lot of Dr. Waters but cannot oblidge
the concept being laid to the speed of clovis movements south
But to help furthur aide his ideas I can reflect that as today
we have found on the Atlantic coast that a land bridge from europe
the first Ice age columbus'es as early as 7000 yrs.
earlier than the land bridge across to Alaska...

on 5 Mar 2007 20:15:30 -0800, Lee Olsen <paleocity@hotmail.com> sez:

Pete,

What I'm doing is running artifacts together from several different
sites. Stanford and Bradley are claiming that artifact similarities
are enough to link the Solutrean to Cactus Hill and Meadowcroft.
However, there is another not so well known hypothesis by Georges
Pearson that claims Clovis can be traced to similar artifacts found in
Alaska.
The idea of the test is to see who may have the closer fit. Neither
side has enough artifacts to statistically claim anything positive.
Personal opinion is about all they have, sort of a Rorschach Test in a
way.

Which two artifacts do you think would be the closest match? The photo
is a little fuzzy, but good enough for this test.
http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q26/LeeAO/BTBF1.jpg

You mean which two of the three would I most suspect were linked
closely in a technology development tree? Without any other
examples to look at, and without any sense of the 3D shape
of the objects (fairly substantial caveats), I would tend
to group the centre and right objects together. The one on
the left looks unfinished, really.

If you are interested in reading Pearson's paper I can email it to you.

If it's not too arcane, as I'm pretty much a layman at this,
I would be rather interested. However, I am finding myself
rather unexpectedly busy lately; for some reason they seem to
be inclined to saddle me with extended responsibilities here
lately, which is why I wasn't writing this reply yesterday,

so it may be a while before I make my way through it, if
it's large and dense.

I am still always curious about damn near everything, and
there is never enough time to absorb it all.


--
==========================================================================
vincent@triumf[munge].ca Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.

I had a preliminary look at the situation in the Atlantic during
the Solutrean period, and it seems there's a substantial shaving
of the distance across the ice margin, from the exposed and
unglaciated Great Sole Bank west of Bretagne to the similarly
bare Grand Bank and Flemish cap
(http://journal.nafo.int/37/shaw/shaw-main.html#)
snip

On Feb 28, 9:21 am, "Lee Olsen" <paleoc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
snip
But the Continental Shelf is not
the same distance from land
now
everywhere on the Iberian Peninsula,
so the sea in some areas was
just as close (or within reason) then as it is now.
snip

Lee, please give us your definition of "continental shelf".
The standard definition has the continental shelf
immediately adjacent to land, but you would have it
at some distance from land, so
I don't know what you're talking about.

Please tell us what you were talking about,
and what it was that the sea was just as close to.

-
Daryl Krupa

In sci.anthropology.paleo, on 1 Mar 2007 16:51:43 -0800,


In my response, I interpreted this as meaning "the breadth of
the continental shelf outward from the coast". Thus I guess
his implication is that in regions with little shelf, the paleo
maritime culture might be expected to be within a short hike of
regions now still above water, so the absense of a distinct set
of maritime artefacts found in those regions puts their existence
in doubt.

pete wrote:
In sci.anthropology.paleo, on 1 Mar 2007 16:51:43 -0800,

In my response, I interpreted this as meaning "the breadth of
the continental shelf outward from the coast". Thus I guess
his implication is that in regions with little shelf, the paleo
maritime culture might be expected to be within a short hike of
regions now still above water, so the absense of a distinct set
of maritime artefacts found in those regions puts their existence
in doubt.

Exactly. Where the sea was shallow and a 100 meter drop created
thousands of square miles (or tens of thousands) of new land, I would
admit some archaeological sites could possibly get lost. But where the
sea depth dropped off rapidly from shore, like at the Strait of
Gibraltar area, almost no substantial amount new land was created by
the Pleistocene drop in sea level. Here sites related to maritime use
should still be found.

I just thought of something else also.

The Chinook Indians on the Washington coast used the same sea-going
canoes on the rivers, just as they did on the open ocean. They hunted
seals and sea lions inland (who were also chasing the spawning salmon)
at certain times of the year. This maritime industry pushed 100 miles
inland, proven by the artifacts, DNA, and ethnographic accounts. The
bottom line is, yes, some sites could get submerged and lost, but
others would be hard (impossible to hide.

On Mar 6, 10:00?pm, vinc...@triumfunspam.ca (pete) wrote:
snip
I had a preliminary look at the situation in the Atlantic during
the Solutrean period, and it seems there's a substantial shaving
of the distance across the ice margin, from the exposed and
unglaciated Great Sole Bank west of Bretagne to the similarly
bare Grand Bank and Flemish cap
(http://journal.nafo.int/37/shaw/shaw-main.html#)
snip

The Great Sole Bank is not part of the study at that site.
You have not demonstrated that it was exposed in Solutrean times.

At that site, we see that Shaw has tested the hypothesis that
the Flemish cap was "exposed", and determined that it was
submerged, not exposed:
" Figure 3, based on the 13 ka DEM, shows that
Flemish Cap is submerged. ...
The lowest sea level for the area is -116 m at c. 17 ka BP.
Given the minimum present day water depth of 126 m,
this implies that
the bank was about 10 m below sea level
when relative sea level in the area was at its lowest. "

You reference does not support your claims.

Here is a more comprehensive DEM:

http://amcg.ese.ic.ac.uk/images/7/7c/Topog-small.png

Even if sea levels were 500 metres lower in Solutrean times,
it would still be a very long walk across the water:

however the distance remaining is still rather
daunting to say the least. Crossing it implies a culture capable
of functioning entirely in the icefloe environment for such
a length of time as to be essentially free of any need for
dry landfall. There is certainly no equivalent of such a
culture among modern arctic peoples, yet if the weather
(particularly wind storms) was not too severe, and seals and
great auks were plentiful in the manner of penguins, it
is not completely beyond the reach of possibility. People
are nothing if not resourceful. But that is two large ifs.

http://www.mersea.eu.org/Insitu-Obs/1-images/Atlantic-Deployment_ovide.jpg

Here is a map with a 100-metre depth contour; note that
it does not give an appreciably closer starting-point for
a Last Glacial Maximum crossing from Europe to America:

http://www.nuigalway.ie/research/mmc/research/northEastAtlanticModel.html

Exactly. Where the sea was shallow and a 100 meter drop created
thousands of square miles (or tens of thousands) of new land, I would
admit some archaeological sites could possibly get lost. But where the
sea depth dropped off rapidly from shore, like at the Strait of
Gibraltar area, almost no substantial amount new land was created by
the Pleistocene drop in sea level. Here sites related to maritime use
should still be found.

This is silly. (a) Who would want to make
a camp site -- with their infants and small
children -- on the top of high cliff overlooking
the sea

I just thought of something else also.

Fatal.

snip

Exactly. Where the sea was shallow and a 100 meter drop created
thousands of square miles (or tens of thousands) of new land, I would
admit some archaeological sites could possibly get lost. But where the
sea depth dropped off rapidly from shore, like at the Strait of
Gibraltar area, almost no substantial amount new land was created by
the Pleistocene drop in sea level. Here sites related to maritime use
should still be found.

This is silly. (a) Who would want to make
a camp site -- with their infants and small
children -- on the top of high cliff overlooking
the sea

The real question is, how did you get from this...

Here sites related to maritime use should still be found.

On Feb 28, 8:21 am in this thread, Lee Olsen wrote:
"Sea mammal hunters use high ground to spot their game, where are
those artifacts?"

to infants and small children camping on a cliff?

This is silly. (a) Who would want to make
a camp site -- with their infants and small
children -- on the top of high cliff overlooking
the sea

From your words quoted above

Here sites related to maritime use should still be found.

What do you think might constitute (your
word) "sites" ?

On Feb 28, 8:21 am in this thread, Lee Olsen wrote:
"Sea mammal hunters use high ground to spot their game, where are
those artifacts?"

This is even sillier. If a hunter (or even several)
walks along a cliff to spot seals on rocks below,
how do they create "sites" ?

And, apart from that, why should they leave
valuable artefacts behind when they prospect
in this manner ?