"Were humans in the Americas 100,000 years ..." Topic

…earlier than scientists thought?.

"What broke the 130,000-year-old mastodon bones in California? Most archaeologists would tell you it couldn't have been humans, who didn't leave conclusive evidence of their presence in the Americas until about 14,000 years ago. But a small group of experts now says that the fracture patterns on the bones, found during highway construction near San Diego, California, must have been left by humans pounding them with stones found nearby. If correct, the paper, published this week in Nature, would push back the presence of people in the Americas by more than 100,000 years—to a time when modern humans supposedly had not even expanded out of Africa to Europe or Asia.
"The claims made are extraordinary and the potential implications staggering," says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene who studies the peopling of the Americas. "But broken bones and stones alone do not make a credible archaeological site in my view." He and many other archaeologists say it will take much stronger evidence to convince them that the bones were fractured by ancient people.
Archaeologists first excavated the Cerutti Mastodon site in 1992, after the construction exposed bones. Over time they found more splintered bones and a smattering of large round rocks embedded in otherwise fine-grained sediment. More recently, Daniel Fisher, a respected paleontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, took a close look at the fractures and found patterns he says are consistent with blows from a rounded stone, which leave a characteristic notch at the point of impact. Other chips of bone show what he calls unmistakable signs of being popped off by the impact. "Nobody has ever explained those [characteristic bone flakes] satisfactorily in any way not involving human activity," Fisher says. He says humans were probably breaking the bones to reach the marrow, or to turn the bone itself into a sharper tool. The nearby stones, hefty and round, show wear patterns consistent with being smashed against bone, the authors say. In experiments, they used that method to break elephant bones and produced identical fracture patterns…"
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Amicalement
Armand

I find this whole premise highly unlikely, given that the Earth was Created only anout 6,500 years ago.

/ducks
/hides
/hopes DHing is not involved

If they were really there, and were Denisovans or Neanderthals, then if they were "fruitful and multiplied," that means the ancestors of the Amerinds callously and brutally annihilated any surviving population when they arrived, since IIRC, there has been no trace of the DNA of such earlier hominids found in any Amerind population.

They might not have been "fruitful and multiplied." They could have died off on their own for a variety of reasons.

It was clearly the work of a prehistoric Bigfoot.

A commentary on the original article: link

Maybe the work of Encino Man?

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

There was a piece,with interviews,on today's Science Friday. Listen here:

link

If they were really there, and were Denisovans or Neanderthals, then if they were "fruitful and multiplied," that means the ancestors of the Amerinds callously and brutally annihilated any surviving population when they arrived, since IIRC, there has been no trace of the DNA of such earlier hominids found in any Amerind population.

You may be thinking of something else.

"Overall, these genomic analyses of admixture suggest that 1%–3% of the genome of all Eurasians and native Amerindians is of Neanderthal origin [15], and that Papua New Guineans and Australians have another 3.5% of their genome of Denisovan origin [16]."
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"For some adaptive introgression candidates, it is less clear what the selective pressure may have been. One example is the dystrophin gene (DMD), which was identified by Zietkiewicz et al.91 as having an unusually diverged 8kb X-linked haplotype, B006, and confirmed by both Sankararaman et al.47 and Yotova et al.92 to have come from Neanderthals. The B006 haplotype is found in all non-African human populations at low but considerable frequencies (7% in Middle Eastern individuals, 12.9% in Europeans, 4.1% in Asians, 17.6% in Native Americans) and is extremely rare in sub- Saharan African populations (average 0.7% frequency)."
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Certainly an interesting find, though! :)