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Post Info TOPIC: First Americans


L

Posts: 131433
Date:
The Clovis culture
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Around 13,000 years ago, North America was a busy place. Millennia of ice sheets had melted away, and humans crossed from Siberia to Alaska, spreading from the Canadian woods to the lush Carolina coastline. But after just two centuries of hunting mammoth, bison and horse, this 'Clovis' culture suddenly disappeared, posing one of the great anthropological questions of the peopling of the Americas: why did the New World's most sophisticated hunters of the time suddenly vanish?
Now, a team of researchers is invoking an out-of-this-world cause. On 24 May, at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, some two dozen scientists will present multiple studies arguing that a comet or asteroid exploded above or on the northern ice cap almost 13,000 years ago? showering debris across the continent and causing temperatures to plunge for the next millennium.

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L

Posts: 131433
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RE: First Americans
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Learning how to live off the sea may have played a key role in the expansion of early humans around the globe.
After leaving Africa, human groups probably followed coastal routes to the Americas and South-East Asia. Professor Jon Erlandson says the maritime capabilities of ancient humans have been greatly underestimated. He has found evidence that early peoples in California pursued a sophisticated seafaring lifestyle 10,000 years ago. Anthropologists have long regarded the exploitation of marine resources as a recent development in human history, and as peripheral to the development of civilisation. This view has been reinforced by a relative lack of evidence of ancient occupation in coastal areas.

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L

Posts: 131433
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Ohlone people
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For the Santa Cruz Water Department, most construction projects are uneventful, encountering nothing more than dirt, rocks and an occasional root.
That was not the case when city workers installing a water pipe on the Westside unearthed the bodies of two Ohlone people now believed to be the oldest human remains ever found in the city.
Studies over the past six months date the bones back 5,000 years, when construction on the Great Pyramids in Egypt had just begun and Europe was still in the Stone Age.

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L

Posts: 131433
Date:
Early coastal settlement
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Anthropologists in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are identifying new sites to study archaeology that are fathoms, not feet, under the surface.
Anthropology professor Kevin McBride and doctoral candidate David Robinson are scoping out early coastal human settlement sites, now under water, that could reveal clues to how the Americas were settled.
McBride says early submerged sites may yield evidence of how the earliest coastal residents lived and how they got here.
McBride, who is also director of research at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Centre, was co-director and Robinson, a professional underwater archaeologist, one of the lead field archaeologists on a research expedition off Galveston, Texas, in March.
During the week-long expedition, teams of scientists from several federal agencies and research institutions explored the submerged landscape around the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 115 miles off the Texas-Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

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L

Posts: 131433
Date:
The discovery of America
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The discovery of America: the revolutionary claims of a dead historian Dr Alwyn Ruddock, a former reader in history at the University of London, was the world expert on John Cabots discovery voyages from Bristol to North America (1496-98). What she was said to have found out about these voyages looked set to re-write the history of the European discovery of America. Yet, when Dr Ruddock died in December 2005, having spent four decades researching this topic, she ordered the destruction of all her research.

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L

Posts: 131433
Date:
First Americans
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The New World may have been a melting pot much longer than previously suspected.
''Prehistoric Americans,'' which airs tomorrow on the National Geographic Channel at 10 p.m. New York time, challenges the conventional wisdom that the first inhabitants walked across the Bering Strait from Siberia about 13,500 years ago.
According to this fascinating show, the first Americans may have arrived earlier and come from both the Pacific Rim and Europe. And rather than walk, some could have sailed there on an ancient version of the yacht.

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L

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A Colorado geochemist and his Texas colleague say they have dealt the mortal blow to Clovis First, the long-held idea that the first Americans were spear-toting hunters who crossed into an uninhabited continent from Asia.
For decades, schoolchildren were taught that small bands of hide-clad hunters walked into a virgin world over a "land bridge" that linked Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age, about 13,600 years ago.
They quickly dispersed across North America, slaughtering mammoths with a new and highly efficient stone weapon: the Clovis spear point. Clovis hunters and their descendants then rapidly spread through Central America and to the southernmost tip of South America, according to the Clovis First scenario.
But evidence for pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas has been mounting for years at archaeological sites from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to Chile.
Now Colorado's Thomas Stafford Jr. and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University report findings that Waters says "puts the final nail in the coffin of the Clovis First model."
New radiocarbon dates from Clovis-site bone, ivory and seeds show that the hunters arrived nearly 500 years later than researchers had thought, at a time when unrelated peoples already lived in North and South America, the researchers conclude.
And it now appears that the Clovis culture bloomed and vanished in just two centuries. It seems "humanly impossible" that a group of hunters and their descendants could have spread across the Americas in such a short time span, Stafford said.
Combining the new radiocarbon dates with previous ages they considered reliable, Waters and Stafford assembled a new Clovis time range: 13,125 to 12,925 calendar years ago.
Previously, archaeologists thought Clovis arrived in North America about 13,600 years ago and vanished about 12,900 years ago. If Clovis hunters weren't the first Americans, then where did pre-Clovis peoples come from, and when did they arrive? That's one of the most hotly debated topics in archaeology.
Some researchers suggest the earliest American explorers sailed boats from northeastern Asia, then navigated down the West Coast, beginning 20,000 or more years ago.

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Crews working on a waterline for a new high school on Albuquerque's west side (New Mexico, USA) have destroyed part of an archaeological site. A University of New Mexico archaeologist, Bruce Huckell, says the site is possibly up to ten-thousand-900 years old. The site was the first proof the presence of the Folsom culture in the Albuquerque basin.
Pieces of tools, teeth and bone fragments have been found at the site, which was discovered by Huckell eight years ago. Albuquerque's public school district realised part of the site was damaged in August when the waterline work started. The district had carefully located the school around the site. But he says the district didn't think about the location of the utilities for the school.

Source Associated Press

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L

Posts: 131433
Date:
King Island village
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A team of researchers, led by Oregon State University anthropologist Deanna Kingston, has discovered a prehistoric village on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. The archaeological site, shown by carbon dating to be 800 to 900 years old, indicates that King Island, Alaska, was inhabited by Inupiat walrus hunters for at least a millennium.
The effort is part of a four-year study of the plants, birds, place names, dialect and culture of King Island, supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation, one for $540,000 and another for $23,000. Kingston — whose team includes an archaeologist, an ornithologist, a botanist, a linguist and 30 elder King Island volunteers — is working to preserve the traditional ecological knowledge of King Islanders, who today use their homeland only as a seasonal hunting camp.

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Posts: 131433
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Chachapoya
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Centuries ago the mysterious people of the Chachapoya fought together with the Spanish conquistadors against the Incas, before they were destroyed by epidemic diseases such as the measles and smallpox. A new discovery of ancient ruins could disclose the secret of the "cloud warriors". Only little is known about the Chachapoya. The first worldwide publication came from the American scientist Gene Savoy in 1965 when he discovered one of their city ruins. The Chachapoya are a civilization that flourished in the upper Amazon, between its Huallaga and the Marañón tributaries, from about the ninth to the fifteenth century AD.

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