Is Clovis First Theory Finally Debunked?

[Andre]

At least that's what it seems. Nilequeen posted that earlier somewhere.

story

This seems equally interesting:

"When we published the first DNA results from the Paisley Caves four years ago it caused an outcry. Many archaeologists felt that our results must be wrong. They considered it an established fact that Clovis were the first Americans. People would come up with any number of alternative explanations to our data in order to repudiate our interpretation. Today we demonstrate that our conclusions were right."

More Refs:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120712141916.htm

http://esciencenews.com/articles/20...ear.old.western.stemmed.points.more.human.dna

Maybe human science is not a hard but yet, Thomas Kuhn could have predicted the course of the paradigm shift.

 

[Andre]

Now I'm doing some arm chair pondering. What if 13,000 years from now, archeologists came to expose our civilisation, and they found several carriage remains, carbon dated 13,200 years before their time, so that's from the carriage-people time, but then they also found lot of car remains dated 13,000 years ago, so that's the car-people time. So, in a mere 200 years, the carriage people were replaced by the car-people in an incredible pace or?

 

[NileQueen]

That's a good point Andre, but how many carriages will get preserved vs. how many cars?
There should be far fewer carriages than cars for the present time.

So unless you have a taphonomic bias, such as cars being rarely preserved, and future
archaeologists hitting upon a carriage museum, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

edited: fewer carriages than cars, not the other way around

 

[turbo]

Many years ago while consulting in the south, I was passing through Mobile on my way from TX to FL, and pulled off to buy a sub sandwich. I had never been to Mobile's beach, so I headed down there and walked around eating my sandwich, when I saw what looked like a piece of plastic peeking out of the sand. I figured that I'd pick it out and toss it in the trash, and was surprised to find a beautifully-knapped spear point made from flint (chert?) that was blue with tan streaks. The knapping borders and the edges were very crisp. I could not have estimated when that spear-point was created.

My best friend's grandfather and great-grandfather had collected a nice selection of tools and points in Maine, so I saved that spear-point until the next spring and gave it to him for his birthday. Stone-tool gravitation at work. It's tough to figure some of this stuff out. Flint from north-central Maine was traded all along the St Lawrence, and then down along the Mississippi River. That has been documented pretty well, but the devil is in the details.

 

[Andre]

Thanks for sharing Turbo,

Those artifacts are not really rare, if you look at the database of known/registered flutes.

Obviously the point (pun) from the cariage-car parabola is, that a rapid expansion of new atrifacts like the clovis flutes, followed by Folsom flute points, may not necesary mean that the population did the same.