The Clovis Theory, soon to be dismissed?

[Viggen]

This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon's Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River. Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars's team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since - a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have been fashioned into a small harpoon point. Radiocarbon dating showed the bone to be 28,000 years old.

 

The find stunned archeologists who had long presumed the first people to enter the Americas did so 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Siberia after the end of the last Ice Age. Until that point, routes from Alaska down into the Americas were blocked off by glaciers up to four kilometres thick, which would have cut off any possibility of migration for thousands of years. Cinq-Mars, who has been exploring Beringia since his student days in 1966, believes the region was not only a way-point for people migrating into the Americas, but also a homeland for aboriginal people for millennia as they sought refuge during the Ice Age. If he is right, his finds at the Bluefish Caves and even older mammoth bone flakes found by another Canadian team at nearby Beringian sites mean people were already trundling around in the Americas long before the Ice Age. (Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the mammoth bone flakes found by the Archeological Survey of Canada team at 40,000 years old.) Nearly 20 years after the initial mammoth bone find was publicized in the early 1990s, however, much of the archeological establishment remains skeptical about Cinq-Mars's discoveries in Beringia.

 

...you can read the full article at the Montreal Gazette

[Faustus]

Populations of human wanderers will always follow abundant food supplies and will adapt. There seem to have been "waves" of these brave and resourceful early nomads down through the millennia. Perhaps at some point in the future, we can piece it all together with the help of DNA. The Nunavut, although of a different stock, should offer some clues about survival in the conditions of interest. Glaciologists, when pressed, admit they aren't entirely certain of the conditions during the last couple of glacial periods, always seeming to err on the side of more ice thickness in the caps than there may actually have been.

HERE'S another interesting story (if you can get past the Atlantis mention)

[longshotgene]

I think personally, they will find that man has been around in most of the world a lot longer than what we initially thought. North America is no exception to this rule. On the east coast, they found the remains of white men. Why wouldn't there have been remains much longer than 13,000 years ago on the west coast?

[caldrail]

Its curious that DNA evidence suggests we're all descended from seven women - all the other blood lines have become extinct. Also, that if human beings hadn't migrated out of Africa when they did, we might not have been here at all.

 

As to distribution, there might be any number of factors why certain populations didn't spread. Native inhabitants, lack of survival resources across wide territory, or simply that they'd found a place that was ok and didn't want to go anywhere else. People generally migrate because they need new sources of food and other desirable bits and pieces, either due to their own over-use or because climate change is working against them.

 

I don't know much at all about our very earliest ancestors but is interesting.

[Northern Neil]

Faustus' article and Longshotgene allude to possible remains left by european populations on the East coast of America. Some time ago I saw a TV programme which showed stone tools from Western France/Spain. Identical items have been unearthed on the Eastern coast of North America, with associated carbon dated material from the same period as the European examples. I have tried to find a link to this but so far have been unsuccessful. The team involved in this work appeared to be pleased with their evidence, but not surprised. Nomadic groups adept at hunting seals and fishing, they said, would probably have migrated naturally by foot across the North Atlantic, which by then was covered with thick ice. When one dispenses of the psychological block some have regarding pre-columbian incursions by Europeans, and the new age fantasy woven around the Atlantis legend, this theory appears to be quite sound.

 

Like I said, I have tried to find online links to this, but have not thus far been successful.

[Faustus]

I have tried to find a link to this but so far have been unsuccessful. Like I said, I have tried to find online links to this, but have not thus far been successful.

Here's one site named "GREAT IRELAND in New England".

It is at the very least interesting and adds something to this topic. There may be 'subjects' imbedded thus allowing a redirected search.

 

Faustus

Edited May 23, 2008 by Faustus