America Before
Page 52
43. Herrmann et al., “A New Multistage Construction Chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA,” 121, 124.
44. Ibid., 124.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Fletcher et al., “Serpent Mound: A Fort Ancient Icon?” 132–133.
48. Ibid., p. 133.
3: THE DRAGON AND THE SUN
1. Ross Hamilton, The Mystery of the Serpent Mound (North Atlantic Books, 2001).
2. D. W. Mathisen, “How to Find the Four Important Heavenly Serpents,” on The Mathisen Corollary (blog) (05/18/17), “The fourth of the important heavenly serpents … is the Dragon of Draco:”https://mathisencorollary.blogspot.com/2017/05/. For ancient cultures that depicted Draco as a serpent or dragon, see the interpretation of ancient Greek and Roman cosmic symbolism in D. Ogden, Drakon: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2013); see, for example, p. 164: “The constellation of Draco was taken to recall various drakōn fights. The sixth-century BC Epimenides told that when Zeus was attacked by Cronus, he hid by transforming himself into a drakōn, and his nurses into bears, and subsequently celebrated this by installing the adjacent constellations of Draco and the Bears in the heavens.”
3. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (Nonpareil Books, 1977, reprinted 1999), 59.
4. Ibid.
5. See, for example, E. N. Kaurov, “The Draco Constellation: The Ancient Chinese Astronomical Practice of Observations,” Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions 15, nos. 1–4, (1998), 325–341, esp. 325: “The Draco constellation is one of the oldest ancient constellations. It is apparently connected with the very archaic practice of observations and with an ancient Chinese astronomical observational practice during the most ancient times.”
6. The quotation is from Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, 1791:
With vast convolutions Draco holds
Th’ ecliptic axis in his scaly folds.
O’er half the skies his neck enormous rears,
And with immense meanders parts the Bears.
7. Charles C. Willoughby, “The Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio,” American Anthropologist, New Series 21, no. 2 (April–June 1919), 153.
8. W. H. Holmes, Science 8, no. 204 (December 31, 1886), 627–628. I have taken the liberty of altering Holmes’s original spelling of manito to the more usual manitou.
9. Hamilton, The Mystery of the Serpent Mound, 22.
10. Ibid.
11. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (first published in Great Britain in 1889, reprinted by Arkana, London and New York, 1985), 14.
PART II
4: A PAST NOT SO MUCH HIDDEN AS DENIED
1. Email from Rebecca Handelsman dated September 20, 2017.
2. Steven R. Holen, Thomas A. Deméré, et al., “A 130,000-Year-Old Archaeological Site in Southern California, USA,” Nature 544 (April 27, 2017), 479ff.
3. More on Professor Grayson can be found here: https://anthropology.washington.edu/people/donald-k-grayson.
4. Interviewed by BuzzFeed News for its April 26, 2017, article “Don’t Believe the Big Story About Humans Roaming America 130,000 Years Ago,” https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/mastodon-mash.
5. Cited in the Guardian, London, April 28, 2017, “Could History of Humans in North America Be Rewritten by Broken Bones?” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/26/could-history-of-humans-in-north-america-be-rewritten-by-broken-mastodon-bones.
6. Cited in Thomas Curwen, “Archaeology as Blood Sport: How the Discovery of an Ancient Mastodon Ignited Debate over Humans’ Arrival in North America,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-cerutti-mastodon-20171222-htmlstory.html.
7. Cited in Gary Haynes, “The Cerutti Mastodon,” PalaeoAmerica 3, no. 3 (June 21, 2017), 196ff. See also Lizzie Wade, “Claim of Very Early Human Presence in Americas Shocks Researchers,” Science (April 28, 2017).
8. Cited in Curwen, “Archaeology as Blood Sport.”
9. Email exchange of September 26, 2017.
10. Ibid.
11. Email exchange of October 10, 2017.
12. Cited in Christopher Hardaker, The First American (New Page Books, 2007), 183. See also David E. Stannard, American Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1992), 261, who states a figure of 6,000 years: “Until the 1930’s it generally was believed that the earliest human inhabitants of the Americas had moved from the Alaskan portion of Beringia to what is now known as North America no more than 6,000 years ago.”
13. For evidence pertaining to anatomically modern human presence in Asia at c. 65,000 years ago see, for example: Chris Clarkson et al., “Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago,” Nature (July 20, 2017); Kira. E. Westaway et al., “An Early Modern Human Presence in Sumatra by 73,000–63,000 Years Ago,” Nature (August 17, 2017); Sue O’Connor et al., “New Evidence from East Timor Contributes to Our Understanding of Earliest Modern Human Colonisation East of the Sunda Shelf,” Antiquity (September 1, 2007); Qiaomei Fu et al., “Genome Sequence of a 45,000-Year-Old Modern Human from Western Siberia,” Nature (October 23, 2014); Israel Hershgovitz et al., “The Earliest Modern Humans Outside Africa,” Nature (January 26, 2018); Wu Liu et al., “The Earliest Unequivocally Modern Humans in Southern China,” Nature 526 (October 29, 2015); Fabrice Demeter et al., “Anatomically Modern Human in Southeast Asia (Laos) by 46 ka,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 36 (September 4, 2012).
14. See discussion in Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (Vintage Books, 2011), 167–174. See also Anthony T. Boldurian and John L. Cotter, Clovis Revisited: New Perspectives on Paleoindian Adaptions from Blackwater Draw, New Mexico (University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 2.
15. Frank H. H. Roberts Jr., “Developments in the Problem of the North American Paleo-Indian,” Essays in Historical Anthropology of North America Published in Honor of John R. Swanton, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 100 (May 25, 1940), 52. See also Gordon G. Wiley and Jeremy A. Sablof, A History of American Archaeology (W. H. Freeman, 1993), 50.
16. Boldurian and Cotter, Clovis Revisited, xviii. See also A. T. Boldurian, “James Ridgley Whiteman Memorial,” Plains Anthropologist 49, no. 189 (2004), 85–90, esp. 87.
17. In 1934, on the strength of his work at Blackwater Draw, he became a research associate of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. See J. Alden Mason, “Edgar Billings Howard, 1887–1943,” American Antiquity 9, no. 2 (October 1943), 230–234.
18. Eastern Mexico University, “Blackwater Draw,” https://web.archive.org/web/20080523174557/http://www.enmu.edu/services/museums/blackwater-draw/index.shtml.
19. Edgar B. Howard, Evidence of Early Man in North America (University Museum, Philadelphia, 1935), and review by Florence M. Hawley in American Anthropologist, New Series 39 (1937), 139–140.
20. Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia, Nature, January 16, 1937, 103–104.
21. Cited in Mann, 1491, 173.
22. Charles C. Mann, “The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First Culture,” Smithsonian, November 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-clovis-point-and-the-discovery-of-americas-first-culture-3825828/.
23. David B. Madsen, “A Framework for the Initial Occupation of the Americas,” PalaeoAmerica 1, no. 3 (2015), 218–219.
24. Ibid.
25. Gary Haynes, The Early Settlement of North America (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–3 and 265. See also Kaitlyn A. Thomas et al., “Explaining the Origin of Fluting in North American Pleistocene Weaponry,” Journal of Archaeological Science 81 (May 2017), 23ff.
26. Thomas et al., “Explaining the Origin of Fluting in North American Pleistocene Weaponry,” 24. See also Michael R. Waters, Steven L. Forman, et al., “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of
Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas,” Science 331 (March 25, 2011), 1599.
27. Madsen, “A Framework for the Initial Occupation of the Americas,” 219. See also Daniel S. Amick, “Evolving Views on the Pleistocene Colonization of North America,” Quaternary International 431, Part B (February 28, 2017), 125ff.
28. Mann, “The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First Culture.” See also: Ohio History Connection, “Clovis Culture 9000 B.C. to 8000 B.C.,” http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Clovis_Culture?rec=2044.
29. Mann, “The Clovis Point and the Discovery of America’s First Culture:” “Most researchers believe that the rapid dissemination of Clovis points is evidence that a single way of life—the Clovis culture—swept across the continent in a flash. No other culture has dominated so much of the Americas.”
30. See, for example, Kirk Bryan, Geological Antiquity of the Lindenmeier Site in Colorado, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 99, no. 2 (Washington, DC, 1940), “It is believed by the writers that the age be much nearer 25,000 years than 10,000.” The reference is to the Folsom culture, already established by that time to be younger than the Clovis culture.
31. C. Vance Haynes Jr., “Fluted Projectile Points: Their Age and Dispersion,” Science 145 (September 25, 1964), 1408–1413. Important note: Haynes published his paper in 1964, before improvements in radiocarbon dating, notably “calibration,” which takes account of different amounts of C-14 formed in the earth’s atmosphere at different periods of the past and derives calendar years from radiocarbon years according to a sliding scale. Going back as far as the last Ice Age, dates in calendar years turn out to be increasingly older than dates given in radiocarbon years so that, for example, a radiocarbon age reading of 12,000 years ago corresponds, after calibration, with a calendar date of 13,800 years ago (see J. Tyler Faith and Todd A. Surovell, “Synchronous Extinction of North America’s Pleistocene Mammals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 49 (December 8, 2009), 20641). I have therefore taken the liberty in my text of replacing the dates given by Haynes in his 1964 paper with the dates most recently agreed and accepted by archaeologists.
32. Haynes, “Fluted Projectile Points,” 1412.
33. Ibid., 1410–1411.
34. Ibid., 1412.
35. Ibid., 1411–1412.
36. Waters et al., “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas,” 1599.
37. Haynes, “Fluted Projectile Points,” 1411–1412.
38. Ibid., 1412.
39. Mann, 1491, 178: “The fractious archaeological community embraced his [Haynes’s] ideas with rare unanimity; they rapidly became the standard model for the peopling of the Americas.”
40. Hardaker, The First American, 9.
41. “Young Americans,” Nature 485 (May 3, 2012), 6.
42. Tom Dillehay et al., “New Archaeological Evidence for an Early Human Presence at Monte Verde, Chile,” PLoS One (November 18, 2015).
43. Mann, 1491, 186, reports that fifty studies were dismissed. It is important to add, however, that Haynes’s dismissals were often entirely justified. For example, in 1951 a crucial piece of evidence that Hrdlička had suppressed during his tenure at the Smithsonian was—commendably—brought to light by his successor T. Dale Stewart. The disclosure was low-profile, appearing only in the “Comments and Communications” section of the journal Science (April 6, 1951, 391), and it did not outright accuse Hrdlička of any malfeasance. The fact remained, nonetheless, that in Hrdlička’s own files Stewart had found a paper published in the American Naturalist in 1895, that Hrdlička had “failed to mention” when he published his Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 33, 1907). “This might be expected, Stewart wrote: “Because Wilson’s conclusions are contrary to those of Hrdlička. The latter concluded on morphological grounds that the Natchez pelvic bone was that of a recent Indian, whereas Wilson concluded from the fluorine content that this bone was as ancient as an associated Mylodon bone.”
Fossil bones absorb fluorine from soil and water, so fossils that have been in the same soil for the same length of time should have roughly the same amount of fluorine. The reason the paper caught Stewart’s eye in 1951 was that two years previously, a fluorine test carried out on the remains of so-called Piltdown Man had proved them to be hundreds of thousands of years younger than they were supposed to be and set in motion the investigation that would lead in 1953 to the exposure of this embarrassing archaeological fraud. For the latest research on the Piltdown Man hoax see Isabelle De Groote et al., “New Genetic and Morphological Evidence Suggests a Single Hoaxer Created Piltdown Man,” Royal Society Open Science 3, no. 8 (August 1, 2016).
For Hrdlička to have ignored the compelling implications of the fluorine test results on the Natchez human pelvic bone, cutting-edge science in his day, was, to say the least, distinctly odd. He was vindicated, however, in April 1990 when C. Vance Haynes was sent a sample of the Natchez bone for radiocarbon dating and reported a relatively recent age of around just 5,000 years (see John L. Cotter, “Update on Natchez Man,” American Antiquity 56, no. 1 (1991), 38). This turned out to be about 12,000 years younger than the associated mylodon fossil (now redesignated as Glossotherium harlani, a giant extinct ground sloth), which was radiocarbon dated to more than 17,000 years before the present (pp. 38–39).
How had the two deposits of entirely different age become so muddled up that the younger one actually lay beneath the older one?
The answer, and perhaps Hrdlička had noticed it, giving him what he would probably have regarded as sufficient justification to ignore the 1895 fluorine paper, was that the Natchez bone, together with the associated fossils of extinct megafauna, had been excavated in a ravine from a deposit of clay, “the talus of a neighboring cliff on of which were some old Indian graves.” When the famed British geologist Sir Charles Lyell visited the site, he expressed the opinion that “although the human bone may have been contemporaneous with those of the extinct animals with which it had been found, he thought it more probable it had fallen from one of the Indian graves and had become mingled with the older fossils which were dislodged from the deeper part of the cliff. … In the wear of the cliff the upper portion, with the Indian graves and human bones, would be likely to fall first and the deeper portion with the older fossils subsequently on the latter” (Leidy cited in Cotter, “Update on Natchez Man,” 37).
44. Cited by James Adovasio, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery (Modern Library, paperback edition, 2003), 217.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 219.
47. David J. Meltzer et al., “On the Pleistocene Antiquity of Monte Verde, Southern Chile,” American Antiquity 62, no. 4 (October 1997), 659–663. The reference to the 33,000 years BP date is on p. 662.
48. Adovasio, The First Americans, 217–230.
49. Ibid., 225.
50. J. M. Adovasio et al., “Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 1977: An Overview,” American Antiquity 43, no. 4 (October 1978), 632–651.
51. Adovasio, The First Americans, 223.
52. National Historic Landmark Nomination, Meadowcroft Rockshelter, https://www.nps.gov/nhl/find/statelists/pa/Meadowcroft.pdf; Lauren Selker, “Meadowcroft: Peering into America’s Ancient Past,” Spring 2010, http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/Meadowcroft.html.
53. Heather Pringle, “From Vilified to Vindicated: The Story of Jacques Cinq-Mars,” Hakai Mag-azine, March 7, 2017, https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/vilified-vindicated-story-jacques-cinq-mars/?xid=PS_smithsonian and at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#A1zGtDKtgySyduU6.99.
54. William Josie, director of natural resources at the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow, cited in Pringle, “From Vilified to Vindicated.”
55. Lauriane Bourgeon, Ariane Burke, and Thomas Higham, ‘Earliest Human Pre
sence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada,” PLoS One (January 6, 2017).
56. Examples of papers that convincingly document pre-Clovis sites in the Americas are: A. C. Goodyear, “Evidence of Pre-Clovis Sites in the Eastern United States,” Paleoamerican Origins Beyond Clovis (2005), 103–112; M. R. Waters et al., “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas,” Science 331, no. 6024 (March 25, 2011), 1599–1603; M. R. Waters et al., “Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington.” Science 334, no. 6054 (2011), 351–353; D. L. Jenkins et al., “Clovis-Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves,” Science 337, no. 6091 (2012), 223–228; T. D. Dillehay et al., “New Archaeological Evidence for an Early Human Presence at Monte Verde, Chile,” PLoS One 10, no. 11 (2015), e0141923; J. J. Halligan et al., “Pre-Clovis Occupation 14,550 Years Ago at the Page-Ladson Site, Florida, and the Peopling of the Americas,” Science Advances 2, no. 5 (2016), e1600375; and A. C. Goodyear and D. A. Slain, “The Pre-Clovis Occupation of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina” in A. C. Goodyear and C. R. Moore, Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain (University Press of Florida, 2018).
57. Holen et al., “A 130,000-Year-Old Archaeological Site in Southern California, USA,” 479ff.
5: MESSAGE FROM A MASTODON
1. Balboa Park History, https://www.balboapark.org/about/history.
2. Bob Yirka, “Researchers Suggest Comet Most Likely Cause of Chicxulub Crater.” PhysOrg (March 25, 2013), https://phys.org/news/2013-03-comet-chicxulub-crater.html.
3. “Story of the Discovery,” San Diego Natural History Museum, http://www.sdnhm.org/search-results/?search_paths%5B%5D=&query=Cerutti+mastodon.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.