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Science Forum Index » Anthropology - Paleo Forum » the final nail in the 'Clovis first' coffin,"
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| Roger Bagula |
 Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 5:50 pm |
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Guest
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The question seems not
if they got there,
but
how
and in what numbers
and what kind of culture that they had.
The paradigm has shifted...
http://www.inform.kz/showarticle.php?lang=eng&id=148810
26.02.2007 / 09:34 Clovis people not first Americans, study shows
NEW YORK. February 26. KAZINFORM - The so-called Clovis people, known
for their distinctive spearheads, were not the first humans to set foot
in the Americas after all, a new study says.
The find supports growing archaeological evidence found in recent years
that disputes the notion that the Americas were originally populated by
a single migration of people from Asia about 13,000 years ago.
New radiocarbon dating of Clovis-culture materials shows that this group
inhabited the Americas a little later and for a shorter period of time
than previously believed.
Archaeological evidence of human occupation in South America also dates
to the same time as the Clovis-culture materials. This suggests that
people were living in the Americas before the Clovis people arrived.
"I look at it as the final nail in the 'Clovis first' coffin," said
Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First
Americans at Texas A&M University.
Waters is a co-author of the new study, which appears in today's issue
of the journal Science.
South America
The Clovis culture was named after flint spearheads found in the 1930s
at a site in Clovis, New Mexico.
Clovis sites have been identified throughout the contiguous United
States, as well as in Mexico and Central America.
The Clovis, widely believed to have been mammoth hunters, likely arrived
via the Bering land bridge that once linked Asia and Alaska. They then
spread rapidly southward.
Radiocarbon dating had previously shown the Clovis period to range from
11,500 to 10,900 radiocarbon years ago (about 13,300 to 12,800 calendar
years ago), giving the culture several hundred years to reach South America.
Radiocarbon years and calendar years don't always match, because the
atmospheric abundance of carbon 14—which is absorbed by all living
things and on which radiocarbon dating is based—has varied over time.
For their study, the researchers reevaluated materials from all known
Clovis sites.
The data the researchers collected narrowed the Clovis time frame to
between 11,050 and 10,800 radiocarbon years ago. This translates to
roughly 13,100 to 12,900 calendar years ago—a duration of 200 years.
A number of archaeological sites in South America have yielded the same
dates.
"The Clovis-first model says it would have taken anywhere from 700 to
1,000 years for people to reach the southern tip of South America,"
Waters said. "It seems highly unlikely that the Clovis people could have
flown down there in 200 years, Kazinform cites National Geographic News.
"This indicates pretty strongly that there were people living in both
hemispheres at the same time."
Pre-Clovis People
But if humans lived in the Americas before the Clovis arrived, who were
these other people and where did they come from?
"I think we're moving toward understanding that the peopling of the
Americas was not a singular event like the Clovis-first model would have
us believe," Waters said.
Instead it "was a process with people probably arriving at different
times and taking different routes and potentially coming from different
places."
John Johnson is an archaeologist and ethnohistorian at the Santa Barbara
Museum of Natural History in California.
He said the new study and other archaeological research suggest that
there were people in place from coast to coast prior to what is known as
the Clovis horizon.
"It implies that people here adapted the Clovis technology [of
spearpoints], that people didn't arrive full-blown with this
technology," he said.
Tom Dillehay, the chair of the anthropology department at Tennessee's
Vanderbilt University, suggested that it's time to lay the Clovis-first
model to rest.
"Now we can perhaps begin to ask new kinds of research questions,"
Dillehay said, "about the timing of this existing population, about
migrations and movements, and what's going on in North versus South
America." |
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